 seconds or so or a minute just as people log in to the system. Good morning everyone to those of us who've just joined us. I'm just going to leave it a while longer. Numbers are still climbing quite fast so people are still obviously connecting into the webinar. Okay good morning. I think numbers have sort of plateaued so I think we're good to start. So for those I don't know my name is Richard Dawson. I'm a professor at Newcastle University but I'm also a member of the Adaptation Committee and I'll be chairing today's event. So welcome to this, the third webinar in the Climate Change Committee's UK Climate Risk State of the Nation series. This series is all about unpacking and explaining in more detail some of the key risks identified in the technical report and advice reports prepared by the UK Independent Assessment of UK Climate Risk. So throughout this series we're pulling out some key sectors exposed to priority risks and looking at some of the key challenges raised by this assessment. So what we're going to cover today is first we're going to have a presentation that covers the infrastructure chapter of the third UK Climate Change Risk Assessment and this is going to be given by one of the lead authors of the chapter, David Yaroszewski, who is a research fellow in Weather and Climate Resilience in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham. We're then going to hear from Cara Laboshane who's a senior analyst at the Secretariat in the Adaptation Committee who will present a summary of our advice report that the Climate Change Committee produced following the technical report produced by experts like David. And then after the presentations we have a response from John Dora who has a long and eminent industrial background and now visiting professor at the University of Surrey and an international expert on climate change adaptation standards and infrastructure asset management. We've got a longer than usual seminar here so we've allowed plenty of time for Q&A and if you're joining through Zoom then please do submit your questions in the Q&A box and indeed you can upvote those questions that you want to explore and encourage the panel to explore in more detail. So without further ado I'm going to hand over to David who's going to kick things off. Okay thanks Richard. Okay so good morning and thanks for joining us today and it's really great to see so many people on the call. So I'm going to give a brief overview of the infrastructure chapter which I've had the honour of leading over the last two and a half years along with Ruth Woods and Lou Chapman who are also here today. And as you can see from the list this really has been a huge group effort with 28 authors in total from 17 different institutions and there are actually many many more people involved in the assessments including I suspect many of you here today who were involved in the workshops, the call for evidence and the external reviews. So again thanks so much to you if you're involved in this. Next slide please. So to go back to the very start when we began this process in December 2018 we were given our overall exam question which was based on the latest understanding of currents and future risks and opportunities, vulnerability and adaptation. What should the priorities be for the next UK national adaptation programme and the programmes of the devolved administrations? So to answer this we used an urgency scoring framework and I won't go into depth about that today as this was a very detailed and multi-step framework which is explained in full in Chapter 2 of the report but effectively this boils down to three questions that we asked for each of the risks in the assessments. So firstly what is the currents and future level of risk or opportunity? And for this we determined magnitude scores for the present day and for the 2050s and 2080s and the two and four degree warming scenarios and these scores are based on the currents and projected future impacts on the economy, human health and natural capital among some other factors. Secondly is the risk or opportunity going to be managed taking into account government commitments and non-government adaptation. I've actually had quite demanding criteria here so for a risk to be fully managed we were looking for evidence that this would be the case under a four degree warming scenario up to the 2080s and finally are there benefits to further action in the next five years over and above what is already planned and depending on the answers to these questions we gave each risk one of four urgency scores which we'll touch on later. Next slide please. So briefly how did we go about the assessment? So as well as our own surveys of the evidence we had two calls for evidence through the course of the assessments we had two state work stakeholder workshops and there were a number of research projects which were commissioned by the CCC on specific risks such as water availability and future flood projections and we also had two rounds of external review with our first and second order drafts which were incredibly useful and again thanks to those who were involved in that process. So secondly what was new for this assessment? So you'll see that the assessment has several additional elements compared with C3A2 including the identification of thresholds and potential lock-in as well as an assessment of likely social inequalities associated with the risks. There's a greater emphasis on interdependences and interacting risks and this was something which was flagged up in C3A2 and has obvious relevance to the infrastructure sector. We were also asked to consider how achieving the net zero targets may affect the magnitude of the individual risks in the future. And finally there's a greater emphasis on detailed assessments for each of the countries of the UK and this again was a recommendation coming out of C3A2. So wherever possible in this report we split the evidence and discussion by country so the assessment should be of more relevance to policy makers and the devolved administration level. Next slide please. So what do we find? So in total 13 of the 61 risks and opportunities that were assessed in C3A2 related to infrastructure so they'll be the ones we're discussing today and of those 13, 5 were scored in the highest category which is more action needed in at least one country of the UK. These are represented in the orange here and this is the category where we're sure that more needs to be done within the next five years and we have a good idea of the types of actions that could be put in place to achieve this. And these risks are cascading failures, surface and river flooding, risk to transport networks from both slope and embankment failure as well as high and low temperatures, high winds and lightning and finally public water supplies in England. During these risks we have six further risks in the second highest category which is further investigation which are in light orange here and this is where further research is needed to determine whether more action is required and to better understand what form this action might take. And in the lowest priority categories Martin Green here are sustained current action where we believe that the current adaptation in place is sufficient and we have a watching brief category for risks and opportunities which are less of an issue at the moment and the only risk here actually in the sustained current action category across the UK is offshore risk to offshore infrastructure from storms and highways. Next slide please. So I'm going to give a very brief overview of the main findings for the different risks assessed in the chapter and we have grouped some of these risks together to cover as much ground as possible. So two of the highest profile risks in this assessment relate to surface and river flooding as well as coastal flooding and erosion. So during this period we had notable events such as the storms Kaira and Dennis and we actually have quite detailed quantified evidence on the monetary impacts of previous events like these such as storms Desmond, Eva and Frank from winter 2015-2016. We were aided in our assessment here by future flooding projections produced by Paul Sayers consulting on behalf of the CCC which included different warming pathways as well as adaptation and population scenarios and the projections indicate that all infrastructure types in the analysis will continue to face an increased risk from surface water flooding even under the most ambitious adaptation scenarios modelled for CCO3. Projections of risk from river flooding are more mixed with railway lines and stations continuing to be increasingly exposed although the risk of fluvial flooding reduces for energy and water infrastructure assets. And similar analysis for coastal flooding was also included in the study. The judgment that risk is only being partially managed for both risks reflects the evidence indicating that while progress on flood defences has been made this is not enough to fully manage the risk. So for instance the electricity transmission distribution network was deemed to have made the most progress in systematically assessing flood risk by developing cross-industry technical standards for managing currents and future flood risk and identifying critical assets at high levels of risk but these approaches are not yet widespread. Next slide please. So overall we have four risks which deal with transport specifically. Just to touch on the two transport risks in the highest urgency category. Firstly we have risk to transport networks from slope and embankment failure. In summary our assessment noted that increased incidents of high rainfall combined with proceeding periods of desiccation are expected to lead to an increase in incidents of slope failure. And this presents a huge challenge due to the length of the engineered transport assets in the UK along with the fact that older less wild impacted assets such as those supporting the rail network are deteriorating as the faster rates the newer assets. And clearly the tragic events near Stonehaven in August 2020 has brought a lot of attention to this issue and led Network Rail to commission both the the earthworks management task force led by Lord Mayor as well as the weather advisory task force led by Dame Selingo both of which have now reported. We also noted in our assessment that slope failures in coal tips is a specific risk for Wales. Next slide please. The other transport risk to be scored as requiring more action is risks from high and low temperatures, high winds and lightning. High temperatures can lead to a number of impacts on the transport system including buckling of rail lines, line sag, wildfires and damage to bridges and pavements and many others. One piece of research I'd like to draw attention to here which I think highlights the benefits of mitigation is a study led by Nigel Arnau who looked at a range of policy relevance indicators for a number of different sectors. So this this applied to such quite a lot of information across the chapters here. In this case the projected we have the projected number of annual days over 26 degrees in England under two and four degree warming scenarios. And here the 26 degree figure relates to empirical evidence of increased risk of railway asset failure above this temperature. And you can clearly see here that the difference between the four degree pathway in purple and the two degree pathway in green particularly in the second half of the century although adaptation will be required in the both of these scenarios. So looking at high winds these can lead to impacts such as debris on the line, closure of bridges and the suspension of port operations and lightning strikes on railways can damage electronic equipment and can cause land fires. And we know that temperatures and heat waves are high temperatures and heat waves are projected to become more frequent but there's still uncertainty about future projections for wind and lightning. Next slide please. So we had four risks which deal primarily with energy and here we've highlighted risks to energy from high and low temperatures, high winds and lightning. So lightning can lead to power cuts such as those witnessed in England and Wales in August 2019 which affected over a million electricity customers and caused a wide range of knock-on impacts to transport health and the water sector. Although I must say that the specific natures this event in the industry was extremely rare and unusual but it does demonstrate the potential for cascade failures from the energy sector. High temperatures also lead to a number of impacts affecting the efficiency of generating transmitting and dispersing energy as well as direct impacts on infrastructure such as causing power lines to the sag and other faults on the electricity network and wind is both a resource for generation but also hazard with high winds and wind blowing debris causing damage to power lines generators. Again while we know that higher temperatures and heat waves are projected to become more frequent there's still uncertainty around future wind speeds, storm tracks and lightning. Additionally future risks related to the energy sector are also influenced by the future profile and energy demand, the profile of energy demand and supply and the nature of the transmission distribution and generating infrastructure. This is a particular risk which will be very much influenced by the way in which we seek to achieve our net zero targets and we'll talk a bit more about that later. Next slide please. One of the key risks we identified for further investigation was risk to digital infrastructure from high and low temperatures, high winds and lightning and just in general really actually this risk also or this sector also impinges on the flooding risks as well. So there's a general understanding of the interactions between ICT infrastructure and weather such as high temperatures leading to cooling demands and the facts we have 15% of small telecoms massed in areas highly susceptible to subsidence and we know that high winds and lightning can lead to power failures to mobile phone base stations. However we lack quantitative projections assessing how climate change will affect the frequency and magnitudes of weather related interruptions and this makes it difficult to assess the exact level of risk to the sector and this partly stems from the fact that key asset data in this area is not in the public domain because of security and commercial sensitivity. So we feel further investigation is needed here to assess the current and future vulnerability of ICT infrastructure particularly due to its growing importance in the operation and control of components in the wider infrastructure system. Next slide please. Now risk to public water supplies was a really major part of the assessment which we can only really cover briefly here without going into huge amounts of detail but we're assisted with a sort of major report in this area on updated water availability projections from H.R. Wallingford which indicates that currents and announced adaptation will manage risk in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales but in England the currents and announced adaptation as it stands is less successful in reducing deficits to low magnitude in the late 21st century and here we point to the Environment Agency's recent national framework which provides direction on what future action may involve, may entail in terms of supply and demand side measures. We also had a separate risk to energy generation from reduced water availability and one of the key headline points here was that thermal power stations drawing water from the Thames and the Throne Basins and on these will likely face restrictions due to freshwater availability by 2030. Next slide please. Finally we have Cascading Failures which is the highest priority category and I think is a good place to end as it highlights the interconnected nature of the infrastructure system and challenges in addressing adaptation on a whole system basis and we're going to use some definitions from our chair here so infrastructure and dependencies arise if their services are reliant on other networks such as for power fuel suppliers and ICT they're co-located and experienced same hazard or they're managed or used by the same organisations of people and we've already mentioned a key example of interdependences from the August 29th in power cuts in England and Wales. Next slide please. And we're aided again in our assessment here by supporting research or supporting research project by WSP which maps principal interactions within and between sectors with impacts being simulated based on knowledge of interactions between weather and components in the components impression and again this was helped really helped by some great engagement with the sector through a number of workshops so if you're involved with those thanks again for your input. So interruption to power supplies is for incredibly highlighted as a key source of Cascading Failure and indeed the interruption of power supplies is a single risk with the highest impact across the entire risk assessment but there are many others so again disruption to ICT infrastructure and downstream impacts and transport is another key source of Cascading Failure so for instance access routes to key assets such as power plants may not be protected to the same level as the assets itself so as well as modelling and simulation of interdependences groups such as the infrastructure operators adaptation forum as well as initiatives such as climate ready Clyde are of key importance in facilitating discussions between different infrastructure organizations and the government to help understand the risk and reduce vulnerability. Next slide please. Thanks. So we have a number of key messages in the report a lot of these relate to specific risks which I've already mentioned but I will outline a number of general points which I think cuts across the main risks so we have the development and use of common indicators to monitor risk and adaptation progress the need to degree standards of resonance and share data the use of frameworks such as those presented in ISOs 1490 and 1491 to identify risks and plan adaptation. The wider use of inspection and monitoring systems and enhanced maintenance regimes as well as the use of climate services early warning systems there's a need to ensure standards and science take kind of change into account for new infrastructure to avoid lock-in as well as the regular revision of climate data used for design standards and adaptation plans as our understanding of climate impacts evolves for example through the use of adaptation pathways. Next slide please. And finally we have the developments around net zero which will potentially affect vulnerabilities and interdependences in the infrastructure system particularly through the increased reliance on electricity and sectors such as transport but also in other ways such as through the introduction of new sources of water demands for carbon capture and storage and hydrogen production. This clearly presents a significant challenge to the urgency and scale of the required transition but it also provides a unique opportunity to embed resilience into new infrastructure and to tackle the issue on a whole systems basis and we certainly see this consideration growing in importance in future iterations of the CSERA as well as the NAP and ARP cycles and also wider infrastructure policy. So thanks for your attention and with that I'll hand back to Artair Richard. Thanks. Thank you very much David for that excellent overview of your analysis of infrastructure risks to the UK and prioritising quite a lot of difficult information. Now I'm going to hand over to Cara now who's going to give a flavour of the committee's I suppose recommendations of how we distill some of this and those that are most relevant to infrastructure. So Cara over to you. Thank you Richard and good morning everyone. I'm going to now talk through the conclusions from the committee's independent advice report to government as they relate to infrastructure. Could have the next slide please. Thanks. So the advice report draws on the vast evidence and conclusions from CCRA3. David has just taken us through the infrastructure chapter of the technical report and there are a number of supporting research projects contributing to the evidence as well. The future flood projections and water availability projections as well as the interacting risks project in particular are really key ones for infrastructure. So the advice report takes all of that evidence and presents the committee's view on the most urgent priorities for government over the next two years and of course for the next national adaptation programme in 2023. Next slide please. So across the whole technical report the overall urgency of adaptation has increased in the last five years since CCRA2 and as David mentioned for infrastructure 12 of the 13 infrastructure risks now require more action or further investigation in at least one of the four countries in the UK. Compared to the previous assessment five years ago the risks to infrastructure that have become more urgent across the UK as a whole are risks to subterranean and surface infrastructure from subsidence and risks to transport and digital from extreme weather events. In England risks to energy generation from reduced water availability have been given a higher urgency score this time and risks to hydroelectric generation from lower high river flows are also rated as requiring further investigation in all UK countries except Northern Ireland. Now the rationale for this increasing urgency varies across the risks and David has taken us through a lot of that but there are two key reasons overall why the gap has widened across the assessment. So one is that there is more evidence that suggests future risks are bigger than previously thought and the other is that the level of adaptation underway is not matching that future scale of risk. Next slide please. So because the technical report identifies 54 climate risks and opportunities with high urgency scores and 61 risks in total the committee was asked by government to identify the most urgent areas for action now. So in our advice to government the committee has identified these top eight risk areas where urgent action is needed in the next two years and this prioritization is based not only on the urgency scores in the technical report but the committee is also considered where the biggest gaps are in UK adaptation planning and where there are opportunities to integrate adaptation into forthcoming policy commitments as well as the need to avoid locking in poor planning in longer term policy decisions. So the key risk area in the top eight that relates to infrastructure is risks from climate related failure of the power sector but also relevant are climate related disruptions to supply chains and distribution networks and the role of infrastructure in that. So I'm going to talk a little bit about these two risk areas and why the committee has identified these as requiring urgent action in the next two years. Next slide please. So David has already highlighted the increasing risks to energy infrastructure from climate change and these are risks to the operation of individual generation facilities as well as systemic risks to the operation of the network and with infrastructure networks being inherently interdependent and electricity playing an increasingly important role in the shift to a net zero economy the need for a climate resilient electricity supply will become even more vital. So today I believe approximately 20% of energy use is electricity but by 2050 this could be nearer to 70% and we will rely on a single source of energy for major activities and critical services such as heating, cooking and transport. So we know there will be huge growth in investment in electricity generation and expansion of the distribution grid in the short to medium term which presents an opportunity to embed climate resilience into the power system during that development and scaling up. The committee has highlighted this as an important area for action due to the crucial role of the electric system in delivering on net zero and due to a number of relevant policy developments. So we have the ongoing implementation of the national infrastructure strategy and the 2020 energy white paper. We've also got the highly anticipated net zero strategy as well as the national resilience strategy currently under development and I believe due to be published in the first half of next year. So these are some really key policies where we can embed climate resilience and with the UK infrastructure bank now in operation we're expecting to see significant investment into regional and local infrastructure that will be resilient to future climate risks in the risk assessment. So it's really crucial that we are investing in infrastructure that will be resilient to those future risks and that we don't lock in poor decisions which create additional costs or irreversible change in the future. Just briefly on adaptation actions there are a range of adaptation actions for the power sector including more resilient design standards, use of nature-based solutions such as natural flood management and decreasing resource consumption and these are explored further in the risk assessment in more detail. Next slide please. The other priority risk area the committee has identified relating to infrastructure is risks to supplies of food goods and vital services due to climate-related disruption to supply chains and distribution networks. Infrastructure of course plays a crucial role in supply chains particularly with dependencies on transport networks, power and the digital and ICT sector and with the increasing electrification of transport systems the need to understand and manage these dependencies and interdependencies becomes more pressing. As we've heard from David the authors of the technical report have given the highest urgency scores to some of the risks in this area so risks to infrastructure networks from interdependencies as well as risks from flooding and risks to transport networks from scope and embankment failure so all of these risks will have an impact on supply chain resilience and the operational distribution networks. Later sessions in this webinar series will particularly the sessions on business and international risks to the UK will look at risk to supply chains more broadly but from an infrastructure perspective there are a number of adaptation actions identified in the risk assessment so we need a better understanding of interdependencies with electricity networks and the digital sector and the risk assessment has confirmed that interdependencies remain a key challenge in the infrastructure space. Reporting is a really strong mechanism to understand interdependencies and identify what actions are being taken by infrastructure operators to manage these risks and of course we have the adaptation reporting power under the Climate Change Act and the committee would like to see a move to mandatory reporting on adaptation that is better aligned with the policy cycle for CCRA and the national adaptation programme. The timing of the latest round of reporting has meant that only a few of these reports were available to inform the risk assessment so there's a real gap in information there which could give us a much better picture of the preparedness of key infrastructure sectors. We're pleased to see that the government has accepted the National Infrastructure Commission recommendation for resilience standards for principal national infrastructure sectors and I believe that's going to be incorporated in the work supporting the national resilience strategy next year and again that's a key policy development which must incorporate these climate risks. There are of course also non-government interventions so actions businesses can take to build supply chain resilience including investing in infrastructure that's resilient to future climate risks as well as supply chain diversification and like I said this will be discussed further in our business webinar in early October. Next slide please. So just to finish then the committee has drawn out these 10 principles for effective adaptation and I've touched on some of these already so some of these principles are about good long-term planning such as integrating adaptation into other policies planning for two and four degree warming levels, preparing for unpredictable extremes and understanding interdependencies and others are about making good decisions that maximize benefits over costs including avoiding lock-in where decisions that are made now create additional costs or irreversible change in the future and while these principles are defined with national adaptation planning in mind they also apply at a local and organizational level as well. Thank you Richard I'll leave it there. Perfect thank you very much Cara for that. So it's great pleasure to hand over to John Dora briefly who's just going to give some preliminary responses and provide a different flavour from outside the participation if you like direct participation in writing these reports. Thank you Richard it's really an honor to be here to give these reflections on what is a huge amount of work. There's covered many aspects of adaptation across infrastructure quite comprehensively but I'm thinking about two or three different themes here one of which is the urgency. I've been working in the adaptation field for about 20 years now in transport and in flood risk management mainly and around about 10 years ago we set up the UK's infrastructure operators adaptation forum and in the past 10 years we've seen or five years we've seen a rapid change in extreme weather impact and impacts across the globe and there is a huge urgency now to get to grips with both mitigation but particularly with adaptation because we need to make society much more resilient to the future climate and we need to do that urgently so this set of findings is really helpful because it brings out some of these priorities. Some of the common themes that I was looking at earlier there's a lot of talk in there about standards and we have some good ones around now we've got a framework for adaptation which is the ISO 14090 standard and British standards earlier this year published BS8631 which was mentioned and there's possibly some links we can put into the chat to them 8631 is particularly useful when looking at adaptation pathways which help to deal with uncertainty but these standards are there what I think is needed is some way of looking at things in a common way across infrastructure as a whole because we've heard some good news that the energy sector has been looking at cross industry technical standards which is great but could the other sectors follow and could we think about how we can develop some sort of common indicators for infrastructure and indicators based on infrastructure as a system of systems supporting the working the operation the save and continued operation which is a strange word but for society but society needs infrastructure to successfully function and some of the messages here as well about cascading failures many of us have worked in our own infrastructure silos or infrastructure businesses over the years I spent two-thirds of my career in in railways and I was initially trained to look at the railway completely looking at different aspects of the railway and how it all works together and we tend to specialise maybe too much but we need to get out of those specialisms and look at a wider systemic view and some of the the points that Cara brought up about supply chains and systems are very relevant it's not just case just now we're looking at and we understand the problems with CO2 and gas supply but organisations that run infrastructure have their own supply chains that rely on in some cases long distances for components and are those supply chains robust look at the car industry and computer chips over the past six months these are examples of things we need to look at and one of the great things I saw on the common themes for infrastructure was the term enhanced maintenance regimes maintenance is your frontline maintenance is the group of people who are maintaining the things now so thinking about how infrastructure operators specialists owners consultants can can make sure that we're all giving the maintenance teams the right tools to recognise when they might need to change components or renew infrastructure so a few things there from the common themes point of view but some points that like to draw out even more is that there are initiatives on standards to change technical standards I'm particularly working with Sen Senleck in Europe to look at the structural euro codes but these standards sometimes take five or ten years to go through a cycle and it's going to be a year or two yet before the structural euro codes are going to have chapters in there about future climate change I know that I'm working on some of that but if you work in the infrastructure field as a consultant or your own infrastructure or you play a part in infrastructure and policy you can build your own technical requirements compliant with design codes and using tools like the UK CPA team data to to develop standards and I know some people in the transport industry and some in the energy industry and some in the water sector have been doing things like that and when we start to look at those sorts of things you sometimes get pushback that it's too expensive but please push back against the word expensive it's a subjective view based on the current way of looking at economics in the short term what might be expensive now would probably be a money saver over a 2050 hundred year cycle so challenge traditional economics and to do things economically if we think about long life cycles in infrastructure then retrofitting at a renewal of a major component scour protection at a bridge might need to be renewed every 20 30 years scour protection can be made stronger made more resilient at that renewal cycle other infrastructure can be rebuilt with the future climate in mind at the renewal cycle seawalls defenses bridges road surfacing railway stressing technical standards for railway tracks these can all be changed so as when we renew infrastructure or maybe a 20 30 year cycle they're rebuilt to the future climate and again they need the standards we're going to wait another couple of years for things at the uricles such for uricles to be changed but you who work in the infrastructure sector can require future proofing through standards through a sensible way of looking at things using standards and I come back again to BS 8631 which looks at adaptation pathways there's an example in there of how it's been in the adaptation pathways concept has been influencing the TE 2100 the Thames title defences strategy and it's a sort of thing it can be used in many infrastructure areas to be able to look at long term really long term infrastructure and how the pathways approach can can design a set of interventions over time that deal with some of the uncertainties don't delay the crisis is now there's urgency so I'm thinking just to wrap that up there's a need for more people to understand this topic there's 226 people on this call which is really great because this is capacity building the UN Paris agreement the adaptation chapter article 7 talks about capacity building this is part of that this is great urgency we need to get our act together very soon if not already you know the adaptation reporting power I do subscribe to the view that it should be mandatory because we're talking here about critical infrastructure for the operation of the UK for society's benefit it's not something that should be left to people to volunteer but there should be some targets and mandatory targets in there standards we can change our own standards in the short term and the major construction standards are being changed over time and the last one I really want to pick up on here is indicators we need some common indicators across infrastructure that are related to the system so it's systemic metrics we need to look at the purpose of the system what example there in the railway sector where I've worked a lot is railways measure delays against the timetable so that's trains against the timetable not there is the resilience of freight transport or numbers of people moved that's mainline railways TFL have got metrics on people in the network which I think is better because a railway system a transport system is all about moving people in freight so yes urgency let's make it let's get adaptation up the agenda and get investment it's affordable in the long term if you think of it in the right sort of economic way thank you very much thanks very much John so we've now got time to kind of embark upon our question and answer session it's great to see a number of questions already appearing in the chat and please keep upvoting by clicking on the thumbs up if you want to see that question move to the top of that list although I will be a little bit selective and use that sort of chairs prerogative to to move around the list as well to keep the conversation broad joining David John and Cara on the panel are Ruthwood and Lee Chapman both who were lead authors of the infrastructure technical chapter for the third climate change risk assessment so Ruth is a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester and a member of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and Centre for Climate Change and Social Transition so welcome Ruth Lee is a professor of climate resilience at the University of Birmingham and his research interests on reducing the impacts of weather and climate on the built environment with a particular focus on grey infrastructure in cities so thanks both for joining and I'd like to kick off with someone who's joined us from a long way away and one of the I suppose that it's been a frustrating 18 months but one of I think the great things has been the ability to connect around the world seemingly so much more often and I've got a question here from Karen Lavin I hope I've said that right Karen welcome from New Zealand and the New Zealand Climate Change Commission Karen's asking you know given we've just released the third assessment how have the Climate Change Committee evolved and refined the process for identifying and prioritising risks over time what are the big lessons from all of this and Cara perhaps I could kick off with you and maybe Lee who I know is authored a number of reports over the years could chip in after that as sitting on the other side of this Cara Sure thanks hi Jenny thanks for your question so this is my first CCRA that I've been involved in at the CCC so yeah the authors might like to chip in as well but I guess just thinking about the overall framework that we have so we have a statutory five yearly cycle of UK climate change risk assessments and that's followed by the national adaptation programmes that we have for each of the four UK nations and the idea of the cycle is that each cycle leads into the next so that the learning and experience and the adaptation action can feed through and results in that progress over time and a key part of that is the adaptation reporting power as well which I mentioned briefly so that has its own strategy which has developed over time and is now encouraging individual organisations to report on interdependencies and is identifying which risks different sectors should be reporting on so all of that helps to improve the obviously the information the evidence base that can feed into the cycle there are a few issues that I've mentioned with timing but overall I think it is a it's a well-established process I think I'm thinking about CCRA in particular I believe one thing that's helped is we've had a bigger budget this time and also some specific developments that we've made to make it more robust this time from the topics that David touched on so incorporating the consideration of thresholds so understanding where these exist and and how often they may occur in the future so that's helped to give I think a more involved picture of the size of the risks also considering lock-in for each of the risks and the need to take that early adaptation action also I would say the interacting risks project has really helped make this a more robust assessment this time so a specific research project looking at the interactions across the risks in the different sectors and as well bringing in the net zero angle as well so I think overall it's it's just a much much broader assessment of risk and a much broader picture of of where we are and where we need to be I'm not sure if others might like to add to add to that as well so shall I come in here yeah well hi everyone nice to see so many attendees on the call as Richard has just alluded to I've been involved in this right from the start so we've got three climate change risk assessments in the UK and I've done CCRA one two and three and I might retire soon although I don't think quite all enough yet interesting about this this they're still into risks down and funneling down to a smaller number I do remember back on CCRA one we actually started with over 700 risks in my memory certainly right which you can imagine it's it's quite a cumbersome thing to deal with and we've certainly been through a process of refining them as we've moved down through the risk assessments and it's interesting as the methodology gets more complicated with each risk assessment we do which we've kind of talked about today that number of risks does gets smaller as we realise where the urgency really is and this is all about urgency and action it's about focusing on the risks where we can make the biggest difference in the shortest time scales whilst keeping our eye on what's going to become come and get us down look down the line so the risks we've used in CCRA three are pretty much just an evolution of CCRA two where we really distill the number of risks down to a smaller number and the risks are quite funny sometimes you have quite a lot in one basket and we have to kind of subdivide the risks as we move forward and that makes it very difficult to assign urgency scores to particular risks when everything's put together but it felt very manageable this time keeping the number of risks down to between 10 and 15 it seems to be about right I think there's some which could probably fall off the bottom where there's not actually any benefit from actually highlighting it as a risk as things stand but yeah I find it very difficult to think how we can actually move to many fewer risks than what we've actually got at the moment and given the budgetary constraints we'll always face I think 10 to 15 key risks to get the key headline messages over to people as well where this this needs to focus. Thanks very much Cara and Leif are picking up on that so my next kind of question I'm going to pull out has been flagged by a few people in I think some slightly different ways I hope I'm doing going to do this justice but a number of people have highlighted and asked you know how do we actually encourage infrastructure providers and others involved and engaged in the industry to actually ensure that adaptation is built into business plans as part of our asset resilience. I think David Vincent kind of picks up on a similar theme in the context of the role of the regulator in balancing consumer costs but also forward investment needs in adaptation. Bruce Horton asks how do we ensure providers prepare for four degrees when planning for two might be inadequate so I think we're seeing a number of similar sort of questions along this theme of how do we actually embed adaptation into practice. John you kicked off with your initial reflections with a very nice introduction to the important role standards have to play on that. Is there anything else we need to be thinking about there? Well thanks for the question because it's a great question to make me think I've been scrubbing a mind map down trying to think how do we answer this one. It's a great thing to ask because one of the things I've realised over the years is you've got to look at the number of players in the infrastructure sector who actually influences what infrastructure owners, operators, maintainers do and when I look at that I think of major operators to begin with who have things like corporate social responsibility policies and environmental management systems and some of them look at IS of 2001 which is a management system for environment and I talk standards a lot because that's what I do a lot of and there are tools there but how does it all fit together? How do you make it all work? There's the need to look at like I said who's involved and there's regulators, there's shareholders, there's expertise within the companies, there's the society in general and the opinion of society and we've seen in recent years closing the M25 this week people making a point that we need to act quickly there's extinction rebellion so there's a whole sort of sea of things going on and awareness building. There's also TCFD the task force of financial disclosure and work to get the top 100 or the top companies in the stock exchange doing proper disclosure there as well so there's all these players and how do you persuade them? They need to understand and have the capacity to help make decisions to think about and get those policy statements in place through regulators to the infrastructure operators so there's all these things in it together. It's difficult though because what I've found in in the past is that you tend to have a series of people or maybe one or two in organizations who understand all these issues but they work at a fairly low level and they need to get through some sort of ceiling in the middle managers who are all sort of high bound by current regulatory targets that might be on the five-year or whatever control cycle that the regulator imposes on that industry and that cycle means that if you miss something at the very beginning you wait five years till you get something happening and I've seen that happen I've seen how that can happen in practice in transport and potentially in energy and water as well but to get those experts who work tend to work at a fairly low level to get those experts voices hurt there needs to be something that makes a change very top and sometimes that can be something like an adaptation report that can force the organization a bit the organization think about what sort of metrics does it need how do they respond to that adaptation report and then they factor that into their submission to the regulator bear in mind not everybody not every organization here is regulated but that's one way of getting some top-down targets in place but when I think top-down I go back to the palace agreement our government signed up to the palace agreement article seven talks about adaptation and talks about capacity building it talks about linking about and the UN talk about the sustainable development goals and we've all signed up to those so that's a high high level set of targets there we need to get board members in organizations understanding that they're there and the government has signed up to them so as there's a linkage between Paris and the board to the experts who work very hard to get that message heard so there's a connection there but when I think of that I started drawing my mind that what influences policies what influences infrastructure providers and at top I had the sort of UN Paris agreement sustainable development goals at the bottom I had the experts in the organization and it's using tools like corporate social responsibility environmental management systems if you look at ISO 14001 for instance you're required by that if you want to get ISO 14001 certification you're required to look at the impact of the environment and your organization and climate change impacts are those impacts that need to be looked at and there's a link between 1400 and 90 which is the adaptation standard and 14001 so there's a tool there that can help and that can support the champions and no many people don't like that word but the experts to get that message through the corporate system to say we need to ramp up this adaptation fairly soon there's lots of other things I could say there but two key things that I think of as well is again this this this concept that adaptation can be expensive just look at what's happening just now around the world we need to put the expensive word to one side we need to think sustainability we need to think of doing things in harmony with nature nature based solutions and the like but we need to sit back and think really long term five 20 50 hundred years we can't run businesses in a short two three five year cycle for infrastructure we need to think really long term and work within that sort of landscape that's a lot of different things there they might be a bit abstract but I think if we join the dots here from paris down to the expertise and the knowledge then things can happen thank you thanks a lot john david do you have anything to add to that yeah thanks richard um so yeah less probably less on the this of organizational and business aspects which I have less direct experience with but really from the kind of interdependences and cascading failures angle just just an observation from from the project and the the the cascading risks project run by WSP I think that was these types of of fora and and opportunities to discuss and understand the the sort of key interdependences between sectors is is really important and and I sort of picked up on several participants in those in those workshops in later IOF IOF meetings you thought that was a really really great opportunity to to to sort of understand and map their their interactions and make those make those those connections between between organizations and I think this is obviously going to be increasingly important with with net zero and the and the sort of rapid changes around that so so from my background in in transport obviously we we look at these these sort of key revolutions or epochs where we had the introduction of of railways and and roads and obviously this is the the first sort of major developments perhaps in in in the infrastructure system where we do have the the resources of climate projections and and modeling capabilities to actually sort of understand the risks to the sectors themselves but also the the interactions between sectors thanks very much David I think that's a very important point to to raise so I'm just going to come to you if you don't mind it's a similar sort of theme of question but Michelle McAteer has asked a bit more explicitly about how the CCC has been engaging with construction and infrastructure companies to ensure these sorts of risks are included in the work that they do do you have anything you could pick up on that sure absolutely thanks Michelle so the committee we and every two years we complete a progress report for progress on adaptation in England and we also do similar for progress on the Scottish adaptation program and so as part of that progress report we do quite a broad range of stakeholder engagement with organizations and to understand what organizations are doing an adaptation and also to share I guess our insights on what constitutes good planning for adaptation and good adaptation actions we then after those reports are completed we do quite a lot of engagement with particular sector groups so we're often asked to present the findings to particular sectors similar to what we're doing today for CCRA and on an ongoing basis the members of my team are present on a number of adaptation groups and forums across the different sectors so with an infrastructure we're involved in the infrastructure operators adaptation forum which I know has been mentioned already which is a really great forum for infrastructure operators to share practice on what they're doing and share knowledge we also attend water adaptation groups and bail sector groups and and try to evolve as much as we can I guess the one thing is that we are a very small team and we are quite constrained with how much of that we can do but I'd say we do do a fair bit of that but certainly you know if you feel there are gaps they're happy to happen to have discussions about that brilliant thanks very much Cara so um Ruth there's been a question here from David Royal about some of the current very topical resilience issues around sudden spikes in energy shortages of CO2 to support other activities are there some sort of general lessons from the risk assessment for perhaps non-climate well non-climate impacts related risks but obviously there's a there's a very close tie and relationship between both of those and climate change thanks Richard thanks for a brilliant question it is indeed very topical at the moment I guess climate change risks are only one of the risks that the energy sector is facing and and obviously more broadly the country's facing and over time we're going to see a transition to net zero how exactly what exact implications are for the energy sectors it's not 100% clear but we know we are going to move away from fossil fuels but during that transition we are going to still be vulnerable to any risks which face our energy supply and fossil fuel production is vulnerable to climate risks and even if by the time we get to 2050 we're not using so much of it so I guess the energy sector is challenging in that it's not only having to adapt to the climate impacts but it's transitioning to a completely different supply system so those those two elements are going to be really challenging to manage and I guess from the the risk assessment we've seen how useful it is to be able to to really map out the system where everything is coming from where assets are based and located the individual vulnerabilities to different climate impacts and you could expand that to a much broader category of impacts so not only whether we're related to events but also availability of key supply chain issues a key personnel of what assumptions are making on the availability at things of different prices so having that really full mapping of where the vulnerabilities lie is really helpful to try and capture and plan for risk which may evolve over time as we take this sort of transformation to both a net zero and a resilient energy system so I think it is challenging but the mapping out of those risks which perpetuate out those interacting risks the compounding risk between sectors is a really really important thing to do to try and manage manage that transformation. Great thank you very much so I'm going to just try and answer Emma's week's question which has jumped to the top of the the leaderboard as it were myself that the modeling that was done and presented by David I know does look at the importance of environmental flows to support river ecology and they did look at a number of different scenarios and I think in the committee's overall assessment you will have seen although we haven't talked about it today because we're very much focusing on infrastructure and I think the natural environment webinar was was held earlier this week or last week that we did flag the importance of ensuring and tackling risks to the natural environment ecology and biodiversity is one of our top eight where urgent action was needed so although in in the way it was presented and we heard today that might not have come through I think it's fair to say that the work done across the report looked at those issues and some depth and or ecological issues in some depth and that in terms of identifying that as an important high-level risk very much was picked up by the the committee and I'm sorry that the the best people to talk about that are not here today but I think we do recognize those interactions are very difficult to to balance and I don't know whether any of the chapter authors would like to say anything about some of the interdependencies between water energy and environments that were flagged or whether that's perhaps beyond this I mean Lee you've seen a few of these over the years. Yeah it's this question I did smile when I saw it came obviously just shows the complexity of everything we're looking at here you know and everything has got a slightly different angle on which you can look at it and I think you've answered the question brilliant Erich this this is covered holistically because the way the risk assessment set up in the natural environment chapter and really the beauty of this risk assessment was just the interactive risks project which was commissioned which really did start to roll us together and that's exactly why it got elevated to the to such a high-level risk of what it is at the moment but it it is a really worrying thing the water resources whatever happens the climate the way the climate is changing we're going to need more water and certainly it's it's not just drinking water here it's the it's the water that's needed for energy energy production as well we're going to need increasing more for that for calm capture and storage and technologies like that so this is a real thing which needs to be looked at in detail and that's exactly why we've elevated it to where it is. Okay excellent thank you very much Lee. We've had a question from an anonymous guest but I think it's quite a nice one quite relevant and Kari you you briefly mentioned I think the National Infrastructure Commission's recommendation for a standard of resilience and I certainly recall they put forward something on drought resilience a couple of years ago would you be able to just expand on that? Sure sorry couldn't I get better now um yeah so um what I was mentioning in my presentation was the um the government recently came out with a response to the recommendations from the National Infrastructure Commission from the resilience study um and I believe that's the um the consultation around resilience standards for critical national infrastructure sectors which I think is going to be incorporated into the work supporting the national resilience strategy next year I'm not too familiar I have to say with with the detail of that but I I guess what I would reiterate is that would be one of these examples of a key policy development where we really need to be incorporating climate change risks as part of that as part of that work and we'll definitely be be feeding into that um sorry I'm not too not too clear on the details Well yeah I think they're still emerging and and as David points out the national resilience strategy call for evidence is is still open so I think if people have got an interest in that I would very much encourage them to submit in the next something in the next five days um now there's a couple of questions around ICT um Philippa asks about some some specific issues related to international ICT connections um and Una uh um is concerned that um we weren't able to get as much data as we would have liked on ICT and I suppose there is of course a need to balance um understanding risks but also other sort of climate risks versus security risks and so on um but perhaps uh if given where the time we have rather than focusing just in on ICT I'd be really keen to hear from the lead authors uh on you know what they felt the challenges were in undertaking the assessment and where are the sort of the big evidence gaps in that and uh David if you if you don't mind uh having gone first and and uh you know highlighted the ICT gap in particular perhaps we could kick off with you yeah that's great on the ICT in particular or the um or just in general in general yeah in general yeah well I mean there's quite a few things to mention here and I'll leave some for me and Ruth there but uh yeah I mean from from um from my perspective I think we have a real sort of gold standards uh assessment framework here I think a lot of lots of thoughts and effort has gone into this um it assesses um uh impacts um across the the range of of um of climate scenarios and the uncertainty range um in in theory at least um I think I think the the major challenge uh for us is that we we just in in many senses we we simply don't have the um the types of uh impact projections that that we need covering uh two degree and four degree uh worlds I presented um uh some today uh on on specific uh sector indicators um and I think I think they're really useful where we have those and obviously we have um uh specific research projects uh set up um which have used UK CPA team the latest UK CPA 18 uh data for um the flooding risks and uh water resources um but yeah quite often we're we're dealing with um it's sort of you know either qualitative data or or um older uh UK CPA 9 uh projections so so I think I think that's I think that's probably the area that's that needs the most um sustained uh action I think I think the framework the framework is there and I think it's I think it's a you know um state of the art well-leading uh framework but we're not we're not quite there yet with the um uh with with the projections and obviously in some cases such as ICT I mean that's there's a lot of ground to to make up I think for for various reasons fantastic thanks um Ruth or Lee do either of you have anything to add to that yeah and I go to echo the quantitative data is really what we're we're lacking a lot of the time um you'll see a number of the risks we don't have much in the way of numbers we've got a good understanding of the mechanisms through which climate impacts could affect things so I mentioned I saw one of the the questions about subsidence in mind workings and that's one of the um risks that we highlighted is not although we have a good understanding of the mechanism we don't have any data on how climate change will affect the frequency or severity of that sort of impact and we're also lacking some data on assessments which take into account the local conditions of around infrastructure so we might have broad kind of broad assessments of we know that x infrastructure or x kilometers of railway are in areas which are in potential flood risk zones but we don't know necessarily whether they really are at risk because they might have adaptation measures already all they might have certain particularly local conditions which means it's not a problem or it could be a worse problem than than that kind of broad level assessment means and I guess the other thing we're looking is kind of independent assessments on whether adaptation actions which are being implemented are sufficient from what they're sufficient for so our assessment looked at um whether we're adapting to kind of the forward degree world but um kind of assessing whether those adaptation actions which are being taken are sufficient for a two degree by 2050 by 2080 do those adaptation actions use um central climate forecasts do they use the latest um UK CPA team data or are they slightly older so we we've really not quite got a handle on how to obtain data or get where to get independent assessments of you know are those adaptation measures enough and sufficient thanks very much Ruth and perhaps leave you could follow on from that and and maybe just give some quick thoughts about the suitability of the adaptation reporting power submissions to help support our knowledge about the sufficiency of adaptation actions you've almost taken the words out of my mouth yeah I mean certainly that the hardest part of the risk assessment we've talked about the science there we're all scientists we've got a reasonable handle on that and yes we know but we know where the gaps are from being scientists as far as the adaptation questions are is what's been done and what could really make a difference over the next five years we there was just so much gaps for us to actually deal with and getting that sort of material out of the public literature is very very challenging and that the biggest challenge we had in this risk assessment was the adaptation reporting power which used to be the mandatory requirement for operators to report on what they were doing for adaptation the cycles aren't lined up no more so basically every risk assessment we don't have around about adaptation reporting power which we can refer back to in theory that's got the answers to so many of the questions that we've got so getting that line back up is one thing that we really need to do and the other thing is it's not mandatory no more and we really need to encourage people to to do this so we've got this information for the next risk assessment and believe me if that happens it will take that next risk assessment to the whole new level and just to bring that back to the ICT questions originally if we had ARP reports from ICT then a lot of the confidential things that we can't reports that we can't get to to assist in the risk assessment they would be covered in that kind of report so I think it really would have helped us with that risk as well so I think I put the flag in the sun though what needs to be done there's a few heads nodding on the screen as well around me so back to you. Thanks very much Lee I mean Cara perhaps you could just say a little bit about what the CCC are looking at in terms of ARPs but also pick up on our latest progress report on ICT as well. Sure yeah so just on ARP so we have been asked by DEFRA to undertake an evaluation of the third round of adaptation reports so we'll be doing that early next year and that's an opportunity to review both what the reports are telling us about the preparedness of the sectors and the effectiveness of adaptation actions but also to look more broadly at the effectiveness of the statutory framework and some of the issues that we've been talking about today in terms of the misalignment of timing and things so yeah watch this space for for that one just I guess to say briefly on the telecoms and the ICT sector just to note what kind of summarise what we assessed in our latest progress report on adaptation so I guess to acknowledge that it is it is tricky there is a lack of information but the nature of the sector means a lot of the information you know there's sensitivities as well around resilience or perhaps gaps in resilience so that I think is a contributing factor and there isn't that overall kind of sector-wide level of resilience planning and and we did make a recommendation in that report that the the NIC recommended resilience standards should incorporate requirements for digital infrastructure operators to assess climate risks under both two and four degree scenarios also to consider interdependencies with other critical infrastructure and to set out actions that they're taking to reduce risk and monitor progress as well. Fantastic thank you Cara so John perhaps kind of a last word from from you on this. It's like you know it's just a quick quick point we're thinking about data and the sort of data we need to look at we need to align data and think about data in terms of indicators and when thinking about adaptation when I was looking at international best practice a couple of years ago we were thinking that if you've got an adaptation plan then you need to review that plan and monitor evaluate your progress towards adaptation but you can't take a snapshot and say we're adapted so the indicators need to show some form of need to be related to some form of trajectory over the long term so the snapshot needs to be able to show where you are where you think you might be in five or twenty or fifty years time that's a bit of a challenge but I think it's a challenge we can rise to because it's looking at data indicators systems and that trajectory that's what I wanted to say thanks Richard. Thanks a lot John. David a final word from our lead author who presented earlier. Thanks Richard I mean just just just just to just to follow up on the points about the ARPA I mean I'd really like to say thanks to those people those organizations who actually tried to fast track the their ARPA reports so that they would fit in with the the CSERA series I think there were some really sort of valiant efforts during during a really really challenging period over the last year and a half to to have that that information available for us and I'm you know you know really really disappointed that you know we weren't able to to include some of those I mean we had some really good discussions with with people and I think it just reflects the the yeah this this clear sort of misalignment in the in the in the processes and so yeah I mean I think I think just to just to say to those people again thanks yeah thanks so much for your for your efforts there it was really again these these these reports are now coming out so I think I think the the reports our reports itself should be read in the light in light of those of those of those latest those latest reports but hopefully this won't be an issue in the future that's what I think it'll be a really a really good and positive and logical step for the for the whole UK adaptation process I think the whole the whole cycle. Thank you very much for that David and John so one of the questions that appeared was just around what are the next steps post CCRA3 I'm not quite sure who that was aimed at but I'll just perhaps say a few things that on the committee we will continue with our biannual progress report so the next one due in 2023 it we've only just kind of reported one earlier this summer that of course we'll be able to draw upon all of the third round adaptation reports that are produced by then and and of course we will feed in and do our best to advise on the production of the national adaptation plan and continue to feed in where possible across government and industry with our advice that the John has raised the the notion of indicators and their importance to help us better understand and monitor adaptation progress and this is something that we hope to be producing some further work on over the coming years as well but of course much of the action I think is down to us all the committee as as Cara said is is small or lean and efficient but we can't do everything and of course we're certainly not the people on the front line putting into place policies and actually embedding risk assessment and adaptation into practice and so I very much encourage people here to try and drive that change within their own organizations but also do seek our advice and and and and of course advice of a very rich community of expertise across the country in universities and in the private sector and across local and national government as well who are well placed to support that. I'd like to thank everybody for joining us today particular thanks to our panelists Cara, David, Lee, Ruth and John for for their excellent presentations and fielding the questions so well but before we finish I'd like to highlight that we have four further webinars in this UK climate risk series and a link to those will appear in the chat as I speak thank you very much for that and so please do sign up hear about some of the other risks and issues that we've been looking at in more detail and that is it so thank you and see you all next time