Learning to live with a brave new warmer world

As the clocks ticked into the new year, they ushered in subtle changes in our approach to global warming, a swing from pure prevention to a mix of learning to live with inevitable disruption, and a new generation of technology to cope with climate change, Jon Herbert reports.

In the eight years between the 2015 Paris Agreement and December 2023’s COP28 Dubai climate summit, the world’s weather has worsened significantly — as witnessed by the intensity of recent UK winter rain and flooding.

For the 198 nations in Dubai, this comes in parallel with a gradual attitude shift away from facing down the physical effects of global warming — mitigation — towards learning to live with a degree of inevitable and unstoppable change — adaption.

In setting a new precedent for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade”, COP28 highlighted the political failure of many governments to tackle the climate emergency as a united global issue.

Now under pressure to radically upgrade their low-carbon plans — Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) — for 2024’s COP29 in Azerbaijan, political leaders are turning to millions of businesses worldwide to deliver real change on a massive scale.

Enterprise sector

The private sector’s growing role in the environmental crisis has been described as to “come up with workable solutions, demonstrate they are successful, and scale them”. Another interpretation is that businesses will be expected to “do the heavy lifting” needed to make global agreements work locally.

COP28’s ambitious new commitments include a trebling of renewable energy production and doubling of the rate of global energy-efficiency improvements by 2030.

This will require substantial investment, the removal of production barriers, major grid infrastructure improvements, plus short-term energy and long-term carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) capacity.

What can ordinary companies do?

The answer for many businesses falls into several parts. It is generally acknowledged that a low-carbon transition will create new roles, jobs and technologies across commerce, industry and civil society.

On a practical level, many advisors now tell firms to assume they will face damaging and largely unpredictable flooding soon, with a warning that they should not assume local authorities will come to the rescue because they lack the resources.

Leading up to 2024, a strong El Ni?o event primed groundwater and surface water levels for flooding through “wet antecedent conditions” that hit the Severn and Trent valleys hard in the wettest UK winter for 130 years. However, businesses must prepare for drought conditions too.

Flood mitigation responses should be graduated, starting with an assessment of overall flooding risks, and then working through defence options that balance damage risks against the low probability of extreme events, but also the amount of medium-probability damage it may be possible to live with.

Finally, as demonstrated recently by Nick Lupton, who built a flood wall around his home next to the River Severn which flooded eleven times since 2016, steps can be taken to protect individual properties.

Green tech

Moving on to adaptation, a major factor emerging from the COP process is “green” technology designed to eliminate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — particularly carbon dioxide and methane — from commercial and industrial processes.

Firms can work with green tech in two ways — firstly as users, but secondly as renewable energy and energy-efficient products and service entrepreneurs and innovators.

There will also be opportunities in electrification, with electric vehicles, and supporting heavy-emitting sectors with low-carbon hydrogen and CCUS developments, plus low-waste circular economy breakthroughs.

However, all these opportunities have to be financed, prototyped, manufactured and taken to market successfully. In parallel, some existing technologies must be used differently.

As robust and secure energy systems increasingly become interconnected, firm leadership and commitments will be needed more than ever from world leaders and governments, who and which will be expected to rapidly put into place supporting policies, regulations and collaborative procedures.

However, there will be rewards for early private sector movers who really appreciate what is involved in creating a decarbonised future.

People power

There is the human factor too. Delivering legally binding net zero emission levels by 2050 and implementing a global energy transition from fossil to non-fossil fuel energy sources cannot be achieved with just money and infrastructure.

A generation of new workers with specific skills and competencies will be needed; millions of existing employees will be required to retrain and reskill at many different levels.

As such, a sustainable future involves technical and energy-efficiency management skills. This must be coupled with a practical understanding of what green tech can do, and how it can do it cost-effectively. Soft skills and an ability to navigate the complexity that will eventually bring new technologies up to scale are crucial too.

This must be matched by changes in culture and operational thinking so that policy, management and governance structures align with sustainability aims, and green goals are embedded in procurement and contracts with clear targets that can be measured, monitored and officially reported.

Protection v risk v costs

Flooding risks are probably uppermost in the minds of many people. It is often possible to build high defences around individual properties, subject to any local planning issues and with Environment Agency (EA) approval. As a general rule, the costs of higher defence walls increase while the chances of a flood event large enough to over-top them decrease.

For some property owners, living with the few centimetres of water that occasionally come over the top is a better option than building higher walls. Money might be better spent on installing flood guards to doors at the same level and investing in resilience measures that include automatic airbricks, wall waterproofing, sump pumps or making ground flooring and walls flood resistant.

Being able to bounce back quickly from any damage that does occur moves on to the concept of “resilience”.

January 2024 flooding in England

The EA, which was criticised recently for the poor condition of many UK flood defences, said more than 102,000 properties were protected during Storm Henk in January. It regretted that some 2200 were flooded and aims to better protect them in the future.

The EA continues to monitor the forecast and impacts of river levels, including the potential for groundwater and tidal risks. It encourages the public to check their own flood risks, sign up for free flood warnings and keep up to date with the latest information.

Signing up to the EA flood warnings direct service is important for properties near the coast or a river in a recognised flood zone. If that does not apply, but there is a risk of flooding from nearby highways, another option is to sign up for Met Office weather warnings, which can be accessed via a phone app.

The general advice is that anything above a yellow warning makes it important to act quickly.

Be prepared

In 2023, the Government published Understanding Climate Adaptation and the Third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3) looking at climate change and adaptation, risks and opportunities, and how the Government is preparing the UK.

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