A road I use quite frequently, the A421 near Bedford, a major dual carriageway linking the M1 motorway to the A1 almost-motorway in south-east England was under 8 feet ((2.4 metres) of water last week after torrential rain. But why was it designed so badly? There are obvious areas where the road dips, perhaps to go under a bridge and you can see how the water will collect. Did no-one think about drainage when it was built?
A new study from Stanford University researchers, not yet peer reviewed, suggests that additional wealth, technology and understanding of climate issues have not meaningfully enhanced our protection as the weather has become more hostile. There have been some positive steps but “the net effects of existing actions have largely not been successful in meaningfully reducing climate impacts in aggregate”.
The whole topic of adaptation to climate change is much discussed, but it appears that we aren’t making as much progress as we could and should have done. Another interesting article on The Conversation website asks “who’s to blame when climate change turns the lights off?”
Deadly Storm Boris has flooded large areas of central Europe and the UK, destroying homes and displacing thousands of people. The UK hasn’t been as badly affected as some central European countries where we have seen flooded power sub-stations, the scouring of the foundations of pylons and river embankment failures, causing power outages many miles away. “This will create yet more disruption as sewage pumping stations stall, train and tram services halt and vehicle charging points fail”.
But whose job is it to ensure – or try to ensure at least – that infrastructure is resilient to clanmate issues? In the UK, utilities tend to be overseen now by regulators such as Ofwat (water) and Ofgem (power). But there is “no minimum standard of resilience that must be maintained and no fines for failure. Instead, people affected by power outages, for example, can claim compensation after a certain degree of disruption”.
In the UK, there are no less than 427 public bodies and agencies working under the 24 government departments that set their legal frameworks. But none have a minimum standard for infrastructure resilience. Responsibilities often fall between or across different bodies – agencies, advisory committees, local authorities and so on. The previous Conservative government was “committed to publishing resilience standards by 2025. Such standards would instruct utility companies and infrastructure operators on what measures were needed to prevent power cuts and other failures in the future”. So we’ll see what happens with this initiative.
Will it all come down to us as individuals, homeowners or landlords to make plans and mitigate the future risks? Should we all buy portable generators and get in a good supply of bottled water? Or should there be local-level action, as the article says, “direct action by adapting homes and communities to make them less dependent on national infrastructure. In this scenario, services are more localised such that communities or households become self-sufficient to varying degrees, perhaps establishing autonomous off-grid settlements”.
Or should we expect macro-level action to upgrade the national infrastructure, build drainage systems for key roads, upgrade sewage plants and more. But another example of the current situation is Southern Water (which serves 4 million customers in the south of England including my mother-in-law) making contingency plans to ship in water from Norway!
We are a damp little country, there really isn’t a shortage of water falling out of the sky (3 inches of rain here the last seven days) but lack of investment in reservoirs, stopping leaks and so on means we might need to ship it in from the fjords during the next “drought”.
It appears that certainly the UK is not adapting at the required pace, We have suffered from a lack of investment, lack of leadership, and bad practice in capital projects in the UK and haven’t focused on infrastructure in the new world of more extreme weather. The government wants to increase productivity, which is the only way we can increase national wealth, but every time roads get flooded and drivers face an extra 30 minutes on their journey, let alone railways closed, houses damaged, businesses and schools closed, that is another hit to productivity.
Adaptation to climate change has many aspects of course, not just those concerned with public infrastructure. But these are important issues and will have a major impact on the future wealth, health and happiness of the nation. Without a doubt, it’s a topic that needs more attention.