The great tide: is Britain really equipped to cope with global warming?
By Simon Parkin
Lord Krebs is a chairman within the Climate Change Committee (CCC), a group commissioned by the government to, in part, evaluate the environmental risks we now face. Krebs is so assured of the UK’s unpreparedness for disaster, that, in an interview on Radio 4 in December, he issued an urgent warning. “The biggest single risk from climate change for this country is the increased likelihood of flooding,” he said. “The government needs to rethink its whole strategy of managing flood risk. Our money should be going into flood protections and doing everything to protect the vulnerable land beneath sea level. There is so much of it.”
On 12 July, Krebs’s team will publish a crucial report – one that will surely struggle for attention thanks to the prospect of more immediate disasters – which outlines the most urgent risks that Britain faces from climate change. The risk assessment report draws upon three years of research and analysis, involving hundreds of academics and scientists. Some of the research seen by the Guardian puts the current cost of UK residential flood damage at £340m per year, a figure that will rise to £428m as the average global temperature rises by 2C, the limit that numerous world leaders agreed upon in December at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, held in Paris. The experts consulted by Krebs’s team claim that 180,000 more British homes will be at risk of flooding by 2050.