Government publish CCRA3
Government publishes UK’s Third Climate Change Risk Assessment (via gov.uk)
The Government has today (Monday 17 January) published the UK’s Third Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA3), recognising the unprecedented challenge of ensuring the UK is resilient to climate change and setting out the work already underway to meet that challenge.
The five–year assessment, delivered under the Climate Change Act 2008 and following close work with the Climate Change Committee (CCC), identifies the risks that climate change poses to multiple parts of our society and economy.
For eight individual risks, economic damages could exceed £1 billion per year each by 2050 with a temperature rise of 2°C, with the cost of climate change to the UK rising to at least 1% of GDP by 2045.
Work that has been undertaken by the UK government and the devolved administrations to adapt to climate include:
- Investing a record £5.2 billion to build 2,000 new flood defences by 2027
- Continuing work on the Green Finance Strategy to align private sector financial flows with clean, environmentally sustainable and resilient growth
- Increasing the total spend from the Nature for Climate Fund on peat restoration, woodland creation and management to more than £750m by 2025.
- Ensuring that climate science and research, such as the UK Climate Projections 2018, are fully integrated into planning and decision making, including on major infrastructure.
The CCRA also includes recognition of the further progress that the UK government will seek to deliver through National Adaptation Programme (NAP3), to be laid in Parliament in 2023.
The report comes three months after the UK hosted the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, bringing together nearly 200 countries to limit temperature rise and keep 1.5 alive.
Climate Adaptation Minister Jo Churchill said:
The scale and severity of the challenge posed by climate change means we cannot tackle it overnight, and although we’ve made good progress in recent years there is clearly much more that we need to do.
By recognising the further progress that needs to be made, we’re committing to significantly increasing our efforts and setting a path towards the third National Adaptation Programme which will set ambitious and robust policies to make sure we are resilient to climate change into the future.
