Climate Change Bill [HL]

I support Amendment No. 183B, which is tabled also in my name. The previous two contributors have almost made apology for adaptation, but it is not only as important as the task of reducing greenhouse gases and climate change; it will become increasingly important. We already know that the carbon out there will increase the amount of floods, heat waves and droughts. Indeed, we are seeing floods again this week. This will become an increasingly important set of impacts with great public salience and relevance. They will be the immediately visible elements of climate change for the public. Adaptation will be important, not only to avoid some of the major economic, social and environmental impacts of climate change, but also to avoid the political impacts of an increasingly impacted upon and concerned public. It is important that the Bill is strengthened in terms of the adaptation agenda. One way to do that would be to provide for independent scrutiny of the Government’s risk analysis and the adaptation programme in a similar way to the independent scrutiny to be exerted by the climate change committee over the targets issue. Specific skills will be needed for that; namely, skills in risk analysis, technical skills in water supply, flood risk management, public health, contingency planning, economics, asset management and infrastructure, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, ecology and biodiversity. Not only would these skills be necessary to do an appraisal of the risk assessment and the programmes, they also would enable the Government to gain from an appraisal of the adaptation agenda a background, a context, for successive carbon budgets. That would be a useful analysis to feed into the work of the Committee on Climate Change. Clearly if the impacts of climate change were getting worse, we would need to be a lot more stringent about how fast we were approaching the budgets and targets. The amendments that you have before you are threefold and to some extent they encapsulate the range of options open if there was to be a process of independent scrutiny. Amendment No. 158 talks about giving that role to the Committee on Climate Change. We have already talked about the fact that that would extend the role of the committee and diffuse it from its key focus, which needs to be targets in greenhouse gas reduction. It would mean another set of skills and the committee would probably have to be bigger, which would not be a good idea. Amendment No. 175 gives a role to the Environmental Audit Committee but really what is required is independent scrutiny on the basis of scientific expertise. The Environmental Audit Committee would be parliamentary scrutiny but would not be in the position of having specialist expertise. We would need to bring that in. Again, that does not quite do the trick. The proposal in Amendment No. 183B for an adaptation committee would bring in that specific expertise and would allow for an independent assessment of the Government’s risk assessment on the adaptation plan and progress against it on an expert basis, not on a political basis. If that was seen as more bureaucracy, more committees and more cost, it could be done on a periodic basis rather than having a Standing Committee. That would reduce all of those concerns but it would be a bit cheeseparing, to be honest, in the face of the real economic and social impacts that climate change is going to produce in terms of our requirement to adapt. The figures for flood risk management and flood damage alone are astronomically large. Quibbling about the cost of a small expert committee is too much. An adaptation committee, given a very tight focus on technical assessment of the adaptation agenda, would provide a real focus that could feed into the considerations of the Committee on Climate Change. It would give a reassurance to the public and above all would probably give defence to the Government of the day when climate change impacts start to really produce major public concern about the floods, droughts, heat waves and desertification that we are inevitably going to see as climate change bites.