Information and advice to help you to plan for a changing climate.
If you are in the early stages of considering how climate change will affect your organisation, we suggest you start with the Adaptation Wizard. The Adaptation Wizard sets out a five stage process to develop an adaptation plan for your organisation and suggests a number of other resources to help you.
The five stages of the Adaptation Wizard will help you to:
- work out what you want your plan to achieve and who you need to work with
- assess how vulnerable your organisation is to current weather
- consider how your organisation will be affected by future changes in climate
- identify, assess and implement preferred adaptation options
- monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of your adaptation plan.
1. Getting Started
Step 1 of the Adaptation Wizard helps you to identify your objectives and define the scale and scope of your assessment. It also encourages you to consider a time-frame and identify who you need to engage with.
2. Assess your vulnerability to the current climate
Do you know how vulnerable your organisation is to current weather? This information can help to build the resilience of your organisation, irrespective of future changes. It is also helps make the case to other colleagues if there is a need for further action on climate change.
Step 2 of the Adaptation Wizard provides a template for you to collate information from company records and your experience to identify how particular types of weather have affected your organisation in the past, and what the consequences of those weather events were. The template is suitable for use by any type of business or public sector organisation.
If you are undertaking this assessment for a Local Authority we suggest you use LCLIP (Local Climate Impacts Profile) as it is tailored to your circumstances.
3. Identifying impacts of future climate change
To identify the potential impacts of a changing climate on your organisation, and to identify priority risks that need to be addressed, complete Step 3 of the Adaptation Wizard. This sets out a simple impacts identification and risk assessment process.
If you are mainly interested in identifying potential threats and opportunities of a changing climate, we suggest you use BACLIAT (Business Areas Climate Impacts Assessment Tool). Originally developed for businesses, this resource can be used by any organisation.
To help you understand how the climate of the UK may change, see the UK Climate Projections website.
4. Identify and assess potential adaptation options
Step 4 of the Adaptation Wizard describes how you need to develop plan on how to respond to risks and opportunities identified in Step 3.
Identifying Adaptation Options will help you identify a range of options to address your priority risks.
If you are looking for quick, practical actions you can take to make your organisation more resilient to present and future weather and climate, see Be Climate Ready – a quick guide developed in collaboration with Defra and Climate Week. This is particularly relevant for small and medium-sized organisations.
5. Monitoring and evaluation
Adaptation is an iterative process – if you develop an adaptation plan, you should monitor and evaluate your actions to ensure they are meeting your intended objectives. Step 5 of the Adaptation Wizard provides guidance on how to do this.
You can find more detailed guidance on this step of the process in the Adaptation Monitoring and Evaluation report.
Where can I find more information on my sector?
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