The government’s plan to cope with the climate crisis has been condemned as “very weak” by experts, who say not enough is being done to protect lives and livelihoods.
Responding to the document, which was leaked to the Guardian, one highlighted its failure to adequately protect people in the UK from extreme heat. The heatwave in 2022, when temperatures surpassed 40C for the first time, led to the early deaths of more than 3,000 people, wildfires, buckled rail lines and farmers struggling with drought. Southern Europe is in the grip of a searing heatwave.
Another expert said there was a “yawning gap” in measures to restore nature, which is a vital part of adapting to climate change.
The National Adaptation Programme is expected to be published on Tuesday by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which is required by law to produce a plan every five years. In March, the government’s official advisers, the Climate Change Committee, said its publication would be a “make-or-break moment”.
Ministers have been criticised for years over the failure to make adequate plans for the impacts of global heating. The CCC said in March that the UK was “strikingly unprepared” and that there had been a “lost decade” in action on adaptation. It said heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms would intensify in the coming years until carbon emissions reached net zero.
“The new plan falls far short of being a strategy that will ensure the protection of lives and livelihoods against more frequent and intense floods, droughts and heatwaves,” said Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.
In the foreword of the plan, the environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, writes: “This programme represents a step-change in our approach to managing the risks of climate change, moving us from planning to action.”
But Ward said: “Despite the claim of a step-change, it outlines measures that lack the urgency and scale necessary to make households and businesses resilient.
“For example, the section on dealing with the mounting risks of heatwaves is very weak. It promises lots of new research on how homes and workplaces overheat, when this work should already have been undertaken. We need a national heat risk strategy and an urgent retrofit programme to stop existing buildings from overheating and damaging health and productivity.”
A source with detailed knowledge of the plan said: “This is yet another weak plan coming from a government that isn’t prioritising climate change or the environment.” The source said restatements of existing measures had been used in an attempt to “beef up” the plan.
The plan cites building regulations that have been in force since June 2022 aimed at ensuring residents of new residential buildings are not exposed to extreme heat, although they do not cover existing buildings.
It also cites the £5.2bn investment in new flood and coastal defences, announced in 2020, and Defra’s Plan for Water, local nature recovery strategies, and environmental land management schemes, also already announced.
The plan says the government will triple the funding for climate adaptation overseas from £500m in 2019 to £1.5bn in 2025 to help vulnerable countries and to “reduce the likelihood of emerging risks cascading to the UK”. This funding will come from the £11.6bn of international climate finance pledges by the government, the plan says. But a Foreign Office document recently leaked to the Guardian showed this pledge would be near impossible to meet.
Richard Benwell, the chief executive of the Wildlife and Countryside Link, a coalition of 76 green groups in England, said: “The government is right that reversing nature’s decline is a critical part of our response to climate change. Unfortunately, there’s still a substantial gap between the measures listed in the plan and what’s needed for nature’s recovery. That gap yawns all the wider with the added pressures of climate change on species and habitats.”
Benwell said ministers could start bridging the “adaptation gap” this week by giving local nature recovery strategies the much stronger legal footing they need to be effective, when the levelling up and regeneration bill is debated in the House of Lords: “The government must surely accept the amendments if it is serious about adaptation.”
Some of the new measures set out in the adaptation plan were welcomed. “Perhaps the most significant is the promise to create a new cross-departmental climate resilience board to drive further government action,” said Ward. “The task of making the UK more resilient to climate change is too important to be left to Defra.”
Defra has been contacted for comment.
