Advisors press government for climate resilience action on infrastructure

The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) and Climate Change Committee (CCC) have written jointly to the environment secretary and deputy prime minister urging them to overhaul the resilience of key infrastructure services to the effects of climate change.

In recent weeks, the CCC has published its biennial Adaptation Progress Report and the NIC its annual Infrastructure Progress Review. Both reports highlight significant gaps in delivering climate-resilient infrastructure. Building on these, the advisory bodies set out five steps to accelerate national adaptation planning to protect key networks:

• setting clear and measurable goals for resilience, and action plans to deliver them;

• ensuring these standards are developed in time to inform forthcoming regulatory price control periods “Between now and 2029 there will be new price controls for electricity, gas, twice for water and a new control period for Network Rail…If new outcome-based resilience standards are not developed until 2030, every single one of those cycles will be missed and the window of opportunity for investment to meet those standards will be pushed back until the 2030s”;

• giving explicit duties for resilience to all infrastructure regulators. Ofgem, Ofcom and the ORR should have a resilience duty akin to Ofwat’s, and all should be given a duty to support the delivery of net zero;

• Cabinet-level oversight of interdependencies and whole-system resilience; and

• embedding resilience in infrastructure planning as we move to an economy more reliant on electricity.

The NIC and CCC pointed out Government has two imminent opportunities to embed better climate adaptation in this way: by clarifying delivery milestones in the National Resilience Framework and by showing “real vision in the the Third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3). “Research for the CCC has shown that, across all sectors, additional investment of up to £10bn per year for climate adaption may be needed this decade. NAP3 is the opportunity to provide clarity and direction on how this will be funded, financed and delivered.”