Wild weather and water have finally dropped out of UK headlines.
However, the effects of climate change are piling up. Worldwide, water, wild weather and climate change are dominating the news; droughts, crop failures and malnutrition in southern Africa. Drought and flooding in California. Fires in Indonesia’s rainforest and Canada. Crop failures in the Philippines.
The first three months of this year broke temperature records as the warmest ever measured with forecasts suggesting 2016 may be the hottest year on record. A recent paper predicted catastrophic Antarctic melting and a massive rise in sea level. If countries meet their Paris agreement pledges, rising sea levels could be slowed down dramatically.
Our understanding of the causes and effects of climate change are improving rapidly. The focus now is on establishing what will happen, where and when so we can prepare for it.
So, with more violent storms, heavy rains dropping more in a day then previously fell in a year, and extensive flooding, what should we be doing?
- We should not make the problem worse. That means building in the right places in the right way. To improve the housing shortage, the new Housing & Planning Act could potentially fast-track thousands of new homes through planning, without adequate environmental impact assessment or consideration of sustainable surface water management.
- We should make sensible provision for upstream water management and flood defences, so when the rains come they don’t overwhelm towns, bridges, roads, rail and other infrastructure in their way.
- Buildings and the surrounding hard standing should be designed with the capacity and resilience to cope with this additional rainwater, and we should balance the mix of soft and engineered sustainable drainage to achieve practical solutions at any scale.
- We must learn to manage for too little, as well as too much water. A warmer, wetter, more volatile UK will experience drought too. The climate is not just changing, it’s going through a step change.
Making the transition to a resilient built environment with resilient buildings, so we can live in
a more turbulent wetter climate, depends on supply chains working together, and working with people across and outside the industry. Overall it requires joined-up solutions and integrated thinking from rain to drain.
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My name is Caroline Hairsine. I'm a Senior Construction Underwriter at CNA Hardy and have specialised in the construction industry for over ten years. Follow CNA Hardy’s blog series on LinkedIn.