Climate change is one of the most significant challenges facing the West Midlands. However, people and organisations are often unclear about the nature and scale of the challenges and opportunities, or of the responses and choices that they will have to make.
Our report Challenge or opportunity? How to plan for climate change (pdf, 1.3mb), published November 2009, aims to help decision makers understand how climate change will impact on them.
The report also gives practical ways of adapting to, and taking advantage of, the opportunities and challenges presented by climate change.
The themes
- The built environment.
- Natural resources: water, land use and food.
- Transport.
- Health.
- Energy and waste.
- Business, skills and education.
The questions asked
To get clear perspectives on the themes we worked with people from those areas who either wrote, or helped the Observatory write, analysis of the impacts of climate change. Each chapter answers these questions:
- What behavioural change the authors wish to see within their policy area to achieve policy objectives.
- What impact they see the challenges and opportunities facing their policy area having on the West Midlands economy.
- What infrastructure they envisage being developed or required due to the impact of climate change.
- How the challenges and opportunities in their policy area vary between urban and rural parts of the West Midlands, if at all.
- What implications the authors consider climate change will have on poverty, community cohesion and building resilience.
Shared messages
We identified the following messages consistent across all the policy themes:
Climate change will bring some serious challenges but there are already a whole range of opportunities for mitigating against, adapting to and benefiting from, climate change.
We need to use fewer resources and be more efficient with the resources we do use.
By factoring climate change into our planning and investment decisions now, we can minimise the costs of adapting to that change in the future.
On a consumer level, use of demand management is an important signal towards the more efficient use of resources.
There are opportunities ahead:
- Growing market for those businesses operating in the environmental technologies sector.
- New drivers for innovation.
- Opportunity to become self-sufficient in energy supply and reduce costs.
The West Midlands tourist industry should benefit from warmer weather and the escalating cost of foreign travel, but this needs to be planned sustainably so we do not damage our environment.
There are two strands to the infrastructure challenge:
- Need for new infrastructure to facilitate adaptation and mitigation of climate change.
- Ability of large scale infrastructure procurement to drive low carbon development.
Climate change workshop
The thematic dialogue on climate change began with a workshop on 20 April 2009.
We aimed the workshop at both policy makers and research professionals. We wanted to bring the two groups together to help understand key issues about climate change in the West Midlands and to understand areas where further work is required.
Here are the presentations:
The climate change dialogue was completed in 2009.