 Good morning everybody. We'll start very shortly. We're just waiting for participants to arrive. We'll start in a couple of minutes. We're just people are arriving rapidly at the moment, so just give a few more people a chance to arrive and then we'll begin. Well, good morning everybody and for those of you who've been waiting for the last few minutes, thank you very much for your patience. Welcome to this seminar on climate resilience and the UK's preparedness for climate risk. It's the sixth of the Committee on Climate Changes seminars expanding on the content of the technical report, the evidence base for the third climate change risk assessment and indeed also on our advice to government on the third climate change risk assessment which we published in June this year and it feels very timely with the Environment Agencies report of course that's just come out on the UK's failure to adapt to the changing climate. So the focus of today's seminar is the interaction between adaptation and our ambitions of achieving net zero and there is a lot of interaction and indeed we will struggle to achieve net zero unless we focus more strongly on adaptation and there are two areas in particular where that is really critical. One of them is in terms of our energy system and the other one is in terms of nature and our reliance on nature-based solutions for achieving net zero. So we've got a great lineup for you today. We're going to start with Richard Miller from the Climate Change Committee Secretariat. He's our head of adaptation. He's going to go through the recommendations, a summary of the recommendations from the technical report and indeed our advice report to government. We've then got two really expert panellists who are going to give us some commentary. We've got Emma Pinchbeck, the Chief Executive of Energy UK and Professor Chris Evans from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. We'll then move on to a Q&A session and can I encourage you to start typing your questions in the chat as the panellists are talking and also vote for the questions you like to make sure I ask the ones that are the ones that seem most relevant and most important to the majority of you. We'll kick the Q&A session off though because we're lucky enough to have Mike Thompson from the Climate Change Committee Secretariat with us and we will kick the Q&A session off by me taking chairs prerogative to ask Mike to tell us a bit about how climate change and the need for adaptation was taken into account in producing the committee's sixth carbon budget advice. So that's enough from me. Let us kick off with hearing from Richard Miller about what we said back in June. Richard. Thank you very much and hello everyone. It's great to be able to speak to you this morning and to give you a few thoughts to kick off this webinar around the interaction of climate risk and the UK's net zero ambition to frame up the rest of the discussion we're going to have today. Next please. So to start with I just wanted to tell you a little bit about the the risk assessment and how many products we produced fit together. So the CCRA is something that's produced every five years and the heart of it all is what's called the CCRA technical report. This was commissioned by the CCC from a set of consortium of independent experts in the UK from across academia and industry and looks in detail at the risks that climate change is going to cause in the UK to various different parts of our society and economy. This ranges from natural environment, built environments in our health, impacts on business and industry, impacts on infrastructure systems and international impacts from climate change elsewhere in the world that's going to affect the UK through globalised systems. This provides an assessment in detail of these different risks and the adaptation actions that could be taken to combat them. This of course builds on a wide set of literature that's out there. This includes impacts and adaptation assessments that are around around in published scientific literature and of course the projections for what climate change might look like in the future in the UK from the UK Met Office. And it also at the same time is commissioning this technical report. There were several research pieces commissioned to close specific evidence gaps identified for the CCRA. Some of them are listed in the box on the left hand side of your slide. In addition to all of this, the committee under the Climate Change Act is asked to provide some independent advice to the government on these risks and which ones are the most important for being addressed in the national adaptation programme which government is required to produce every five years to outline how the UK government is tackling changing climate in the UK and the risks that bring. This advice report sits on top of the rest of these outputs from the CCRA and forms that advice from the CCC as required under the Act drawing from the rest of the technical report and this supporting wider literature. I'm going to spend a little bit of time just talking to you a little bit about some of the priorities we highlighted in this committee's advice report and how it particularly touches on the net zero agenda. So next slide please. So what are the different risks facing the UK? Key output of the technical report is looking at these risks and the authors identify 61 different risks and opportunities from climate change across all sectors of the economy as I previously mentioned. Around half of these received an urgency score in the highest category and this urgency score is a key output of the CCRA which really says you know how what's the what's the evidence based say about taking action today? The ones that are orange in this score around half of the risks are the ones where there's a strong case from the evidence that taking action now above and beyond what we're already doing is a really important part of actively addressing these risks and opportunities over the next five years. This action can't be delayed as a good case to take it now as opposed to later to avoid lock in of climate impacts into the future and really fully address the risks as we're outlined and the vast majority of these 61 risks and opportunities fell into the top two urgency categories. That's these orange ones of more action needed but also these additional yellow ones which offer further investigation risks. These are ones where there's also potentially a strong case for taking action now but it's really important that we tackle these these risks and really find out much more about them as a matter of urgency to really better understand the case for taking action now. So again high priorities across across the UK economy in tackling climate change that needs to happen now as opposed to later. Next please. This risk assessment process happens every five years so the previous CCRA, CCRA2 also looked in a very similar methodology at similar risks and opportunities and used the same scoring system to identify which ones are most urgent and which ones we are doing sufficient action on. As you can see in this chart one of the key features of the change between the last risk assessments and this current one that we've just published is an increase in the number of risks falling into that more action required category that most urgent category. This both indicates a changing evidence base and us learning more around how climate risks are going to affect the UK in the future and really a building case for the urgency of taking action now to address these as we understand more about them but also that policy action and adaptation planning is falling behind the rate that these risks are increasing. So again you know it highlights the case that there's a strong evidence base and strong urgency for addressing many of these now and this is only growing over time as we learn more about these risks. Next slide please. On top of these 61 risks one of the aspects for the government for the committee was to highlight well which ones of these are particularly important for being addressed and which one of the highest priorities over the next two or so years. So out of this the committee pulled out eight different risk areas as for some of the ones where there's a strong opportunity and risk of blocking if we don't well show opportunity for taking action over the next couple of years and a high risk of blocking if we fail to. Are there eight different risk areas outlined up here? I'll just quickly speak through each of those before turning to ones that speak to the net zero challenge in particular. So the first four of these reflect to the UK's natural environment. I talk about the risks to species and ecosystems, the diversity of plants and animals we have around the UK which is already high risk from climate change and will continue to stay high as the climate continues to change through to at least mid-century and beyond. There are also risks to soils, soils underpinning many of our agricultural ecosystem services including obviously agricultural outputs but also carbon sequestration. So again an important one to address now given that we know that droughts and floods and other weather conditions that affect soils will continue to change over the future. Another area the committee highlighted in particular was one we'll come back to in a second is risk to carbon sequestration. So again there's large stores of carbon across UK landscapes and as climate conditions change through a variety of different hazards some of these will come under more stress than they already are but at the same times we're needing to increase these carbon stores to meet net zero. And the final one of these is the output from our land. So this is our crops, our livestock, and our forestry. And as the climates change and this also creates different conditions for pests and diseases it's important to be aware of these risks as we think about how we you maximise the productivity in sustainable fashion in UK landscapes, in UK economic activity from the land. The next one of these areas the fifth one down on this list is impacts through supply chains. So UK companies have increasingly complex and complicated supply chains both domestically and internationally and there's increasing understanding really of the relevance of weather and climate-related impacts to these supply chains and their ability to cause significant and cascading disruption across them. Further down again one we're going to spend more time discussing today is risk to the electricity system due to weather-related factors. Electricity will continue to grow and it's important for our society to be taking risks through different systems. Again it's growing in complexity as our society becomes ever more reliant on electricity as its main source of energy to be delivered to final services and we'll speak a bit more about this in a second. And then just to close out this list the final two so one is on risks to human health and well-being from increased exposure to heat in homes and other buildings. So again this is health-related impacts including deaths particularly in elderly and vulnerable people associated with overheating as we know that the UK is going to shift to warmer summers, more intense and more frequent heat waves as the climate changes over the coming decades. And the final area the committee saw Victor highlight is again a complexity area related to international climate change. Climate change is obviously happening everywhere in the world and those changes outside the UK will also have a potentially strong impact on us in the UK through how they affect in complex ways socioeconomic systems around the world which then comes back to us through increasingly globalised networks and institutions the UK's part of and participates in across a range of different areas. So again thinking about the opportunities and the urgency really of thinking about risks beyond the UK as part of our response and adapting the UK well to the climate we're seeing in the future across the world. Next please. So I've spoken a little bit about the climate risks and those risks as we see them transitioning over the next 30 years or so which will have important relevance for other developments in the UK. Now the flip side of this is well what other changes are happening in the UK over this period and one that we're going to be focusing obviously particularly in this webinar is the transition to net zero. This slide here outlines a pathway of sectoral emissions reductions that's consistent with the government's legislative targets for its 2030 nationally determined contribution. It's 2035 six carbon budget and the 2050 net zero greenhouse gas emissions target and as you can see over the next decades all sectors will be required to rapidly reduce their emissions and most sectors will reduce them very much down to almost entirely zero by 2050 as part of an efficient contribution to this economy-wide greenhouse gas reduction pathway that's outlined in the Climate Change Act. Really if we look at the right hand side of the figure the only sectors that are really expected to be continually emitting in 2050 is agriculture and aviation and within even these sectors there'll be significant activities to help reduce emissions and try and limit the amount of residual greenhouse gas sources that are being emitted into the atmosphere at those points. But to meet net zero we know that because there will be some emitting sectors left there is also a need for carbon removal so if you look below the line below the the axis on this figure you'll see that there's a need and a scaling up of both natural carbon removals in the dark green colour but also engineered carbon removals in black to help offset these emissions. Now the story in many of these sectors is largely the same which is that this decade means a large investment development scaling up of the business models and supply chains to zero carbon options in every part of the economy which means by 2030 we should be in a position to then make sure that basically everything that sold or bought in the economy is zero carbon allowing us over the following two decades to really roll that through the capital stock meaning that by the time we get down towards 2050 there's nothing really left in our economy that's emitting net emissions of greenhouse gas allowing us to therefore meet these targets on path to net zero but also that net zero target in 2050. Next please. So how do these this net zero transition connect to these climate risks and these priority risks that I outlined in the previous slide? Well there are two particular areas that we're going to focus on today. One is the risks to natural carbon stores and sequestration that need to scale up the natural removals to help meet net zero and how can that be achieved given the changing climate hazards we're also seeing at the same time as this need to increase and the second one is this increasing reliance on electricity. Key lever in achieving those emissions reductions in many of those sectors outlined on the previous chart is increasing the use of electricity so particularly in transport in heating for example where heat pumps and electric vehicles are going to be two really important parts of the solution making sure we can deliver the resilience electricity system that's reaching all these different parts of the economy becomes ever more important and vital to the net zero ambition too that we can deliver this. Now before we focus on each of these in two quick slides before handing over to the panelists I find it's worth also mentioning that there are of course other areas where climate adaptation and net zero interlink. One example is also connected to agriculture and we know that productivity improvements yield improvements maybe of the order of 10 per cent per decade are necessary to deliver the reductions in agricultural emissions as part of these net zero pathways and also help free up land carbon sequestration at the same time so again thinking about how can we deliver that and being aware of the climate risks and changing climate conditions that are going to be going on at the same time to make sure we can do that in sustainable fashion will be important there and then the other area to highlight is also in built environments where we know that retrofitting of existing homes to make them more energy efficient is a key part of the net zero transition and there are potentially both challenges and opportunities with climate adaptation there in that ventilation needs to be thought about in the same at the same time is increasing energy efficiency to help you avoid potentially detrimental impacts for overheating risks but there are also opportunities of considering when we do these retrofits that there are also opportunities to look at can we also increase and improve the properties of buildings that help reduce overheating risks at that same time so those are two other areas which are important but we won't focus more on today but if we go to the next slide please we'll quickly frame up just these two different areas before opening it to the panelists but for their thoughts on how these two topics link up so taking them with electricity first so we do know as we've mentioned previously that decarbonisation is fundamentally changing the role of electricity in the economy as I've mentioned heating transport lighting cooking and many critical services will almost entirely rely on electricity as they're a key energy source in the future the chart here on the right just shows again in a net zero pathway is scaling up of the electricity system potential doubling or more than a doubling by 2050 will be needed as part of part of delivering net zero but this also I think raises the opportunity to you know we know this scaling up is going to happen and there's large investments in the energy system and the electricity system particularly that are going to be required to deliver that and making sure that this is delivered in a way that's consistent with the resilient climate system being aware that we're going to be moving towards a system that's going to be dominated by more weather dependent sources so particularly offshore wind where you know the government is committed to a to an increase to 40 gigawatts by by 2030 you know a almost four-fold increase really on what we have around today so really large increases but good opportunities as well if we could be mindful of the climate risks both to the individual assets of the electricity system but also the system-wide risks as we run a electricity system ever more dependent on these sources it can be done and absolutely should be done but it's important that we accurately and properly consider changing climate and planning for that system which we know will have large potential cascade effects if it fails across different systems that are ever more complex and being linked to it including increasingly transport and heating next slide please so again flipping to carbon stores as I mentioned previously we know that net zero requires negative emissions from nature to help offset some residual sectors in part at least around 20 megatons of removals by 2050 consistent with ccc scenarios to get to to get to net zero overall in the whole economy and that's a net removal figure so the actual sort of gross removals in the natural sector is actually larger than that around maybe 40 megatons of removals by 2050 and this does need to be delivered at the same time as the changing climate is taken account of so we know that soils are increasingly impacted by by climate including flooding and drought and how those conditions will change in the future peatland is is an important source of emissions at the moment and an important source of abatement within this sector to help us deliver these net removals which you can see from the chart on the right hand side which really shows that difference between the black line and more sort of you know current policies future for emissions from from our land sector and the sort of dark purple and then the light of pink underneath it the two big chunks represent the emissions coming from increased afforestation rates and from peatland restoration so two really big chunks there including that peatland chunk is really important parts of delivering that removal so thinking about how we can be delivering those levels of removals also aware of the pressures and challenges that peat is under today from both human pressures that are then being exacerbated by changing climate conditions and again the afforestation bit you know we do expect that you know delivering net zero will require an increase in the amount of tree coverage in the UK from about maybe 13 percent to something like 18 percent and again awareness of how trees can suffer from drought heat fire new pest and diseases under the climate conditions we're seeing today increasingly in the future will be really important to make sure that those carbon the carbon sequestered into those new forests is resilient stays there and has benefits for other services other climate adaptations that we need to see including new nature-based solutions for flooding but also biodiversity and other things we want to do with our landscapes next slide please so we'll return to these areas in a second with our panelists but just before we wrap up I thought it'd be nice to end this presentation with the 10 principles that the committee highlighted for effective adaptation now there's a lot of principles on this slide so I'm not going to talk through all of them but just to draw out a couple that are particularly relevant for this this this discussion today and one of them is the one in the centre here number one a vision for a well-adapted UK I think part of upscaling our our efforts on adaptation and taking the next steps to really make the UK more well adapted to these changes that we're going to see and we are today requires a sense of where we're going I think net zero is a really important part of that and this really bleeds into the principle number two which is integrated adaptation to other priorities that if we want a vision of where we're going a vision of a well-adapted net zero UK we really need to be thinking about these things in tandem net zero won't be delivered particularly in these two areas that we've talked about unless we're fully cognizant of a changing climate the risk that provides but also how we address those options other ones I think that are useful to to highlight in in this area is number principle number five a preparedness for unpredictable extremes we know particularly in the intensive systems such as the land sector we will see conditions that we haven't seen before in the past and we need to be planning for those now if we want those carbon stores to be resilient and to make sure that that when we put carbon into the landscape it stays there and does that's what we want it to from a climate perspective and then the final one to highlight here I think is consider the opportunities both of these sectors are areas where we know that the net zero agenda and the net zero transitions that we need to see can have significant benefits for for wider goals including climate adaptation and if we can think about these in a joined up fashion in a way that's integrated and understands the the potential synergies where the potential trade-offs are and really consider consider them as a as one system trying to make a resilient UK I think there are there are areas where we know we can do this in in a sensible fashion if we you can take sufficient steps today so again thinking about the opportunities of these big scale-ups they're going to be needed to both deliver lower emissions more sequestered carbon but also a more resilient UK at the same time next please I think that's everything from me so thank you and I'll hand back to our chair for the next stage of the session thank you very much Richard for that very clear presentation so I'm now delighted to move to Emma Pinchbeck from Energy UK to comment on the the risks to essentially an all-electric UK by 2050 thank you so look I'll keep this relatively brief and I'm afraid slightly wonkish because I think that Richard's done a good job of covering the kind of sweep of adaptation and we said that just to start on on a mitigation point clearly the biggest risk for this sector as others is is not tackling climate change at all so the the priority for us is still that energy transition and on the point of electrification that is not just for decarbonisation reasons that we're going that way but simply that the sheer economics and the attractiveness of running a system which is more dependent on the electrons is now clear to the sector I think there is a if we're looking at resilience in terms of that transition particularly within increased issues from extreme weather events we are keen to make sure we can do that and do it with minimum disruption and that does mean that we're going to need some pretty concrete action from government on the mitigation side so you know things like network planning our planning system will stop lots of non-market barriers that have an overlap with what we're going to be talking about and adaptation very much needed over the next decade but just in the long run whilst there are complexities at running a more complex and electrically driven system we are really confident that that system is one that's secure and the most basic reason for that is that we'll have more distributed plant so on the one hand more actors in the system which is something to manage on the other more options to deal with a system in the event of weather events which tend to be more localised so I suppose swings and roundabouts on the overall system resilience and the direction we're taking but from a climate point of view absolutely necessary in terms of the sector and adaptation we've been reporting on adaptation since 2015 there's a sector and been very happy to contribute to the CCC's and other reporting processes there's been a bit of a shift in what we've reported on this year which reflects that change in the system so historically we've tended to focus on our large plant often thermal plant but the reports that we've put forward this year in which has been included in the CCC's adaptation reporting also looks at a more distributed thermal plant so plant that's 50 to 100 megawatts and for the first time wind so large wind farms and our reporting covers 62% of UK capacities it's not all of it but it's a lot of our generation and it's generation assets that we focus on. The other thing is we don't look at plant where we know it's coming off the system imminently obviously so we don't consider coal for example because the coal phase out we don't look at plant that's been given a limited life directive for many years so stuff we know is coming off and we're trying to look out to around 2039 so it's the the next couple of decades in terms of what the sector does and what we think about firstly they've been planning and environmental policy changes which basically means for building new plant we now have to consider climate risk and that's things like you know the location of the plant and mitigating flood risk I'll come on to some of the risks we look at in a moment and we have to report to the planning inspector what we're intending to do every every single time we've got plans for a new plant large plant in particular but increasingly the sector is also looking at adaptation of part of its corporate governance from a climate mitigation point of view the fact that we have a carbon price and carbon budgets in the UK means that the sector has been conscious of things like stranded assets from a resilience point of view or climate risk with that economic hat on for a long time but now in addition they are looking at basic reporting on some of the more common climate risks like flooding or temperature changes as part of our ordinary governance reporting and it's kind of best practice on the international standards now for governance and again we've been doing this since 2015 so we had already identified some risks in the sector of moving to to do things about that where it can on existing a new plant and the last thing to say is you know on their kind of overview is that rather than case by case and plant by plant now I think as Baroness Brown said the biggest question for adaptation is about the whole system resilience and as we bring forward and that's within the electricity system itself so as we bring forward you know more heat pumps more EVs and a kind of more distributed system how we manage risks right across it but also the interdependency of energy infrastructure with our other areas of the economy so in particular things like water obstruction and use for you know recovered land use that's relevant to us for sequestration but also for things like bio energy too so and we need to get better at that and just for those of you that you know I get asked quite often about what the risks to energy infrastructure are so here are some of the things that we cover you know for generation assets the risks are of all kinds not just renewables are to do with the supply chain so we rely on you know having available fuel having available raw materials for our plant water in particular because most thermal generation will have some kind of cooling in particular nuclear but also some of our other assets have have cooling involved usually done with water that's why again a lot of our infrastructure is therefore cited near sources of water or the coasts which in terms of location then means we have to look at things like drought flooding and coastal erosion we look at network infrastructure and that's an increasing risk so is the transmission system fit for purpose are there risks the transition transmission system that affect the the generating plant waste and now increasingly changes in weather patterns so things like ambient temperature changes storms the level of kinetic energy that goes into hydro plants and things like landslides and increasing slippages so these are all risks that the sector already tracks and the measures that they put in place sometimes you know very simply looking at projections for things like coastal erosion and flooding and moving plant if necessary and planning for 25 year life spans for our generation assets all new wind plant and wind farms for example have a 25 year lifespan assumed the turbines themselves the wind turbines themselves are designed for 25 years and assume changing climactic conditions in their design they're designed to be put out at sea so as you can imagine a lot of the infrastructure itself is highly resilient and now increasingly all of our infrastructure is designed for and it's all about in terms of extreme weather events so flood risk so I can think of at least one power station where we've built and the kind of key bits of the power station like the generation room up so it's higher above sea level than we traditionally built to accommodate for flooding and so there's a lot more to do as I said a lot of these risks have been kind of looked at plant by plant and we're very aware of interdependencies and just to to raise the specter of the august and like blackout that actually taught us quite a lot about what happens when part of the energy system and it was a distributed part of the energy system fails triggers a failure in the wider energy system but then that affects other key infrastructure in this particular instance trains and the reviews of that that have been done by the energy emergency executive committee and by the national infrastructure committee have identified this need to think much more broadly across sectors of the economy and obviously we're in the middle of an energy crisis where I think people have you know learned that energy underpins many other bits of our economy but also that we have global supply chains that are interdependent too so this is a personal view but I think we need to take a much broader view of the risk the economy and I was struck with Richard talked about human factors things like availability of workers or kind of supply chain failures that that will apply to the energy sector as much as anything else so maybe that's a brief canter through what we're already doing I think there's an acknowledgement we need to do more but I'm quite proud of the way that the traditional energy sector has has stepped up to look at this you know we recognize that it's incredibly important I'd like to see us take on that leadership role for some of the interdependency and I suppose that's the challenge for the next decade as we transition to a net zero system thank you very much Emma and I think we would very much agree with you on the adaptation committee we've always ranked the kind of risk assessment that the individual plants and generators do pretty highly in our adaptation reports but really the issue has moved to that I think the system risk and the system risk because as you have said the cascade of failures you get from a potentially from a failure in part of the electricity system is already significant by the time we get to 2050 when not 15% of our energy is electric but something like 70% of our energy is electric those cascades will just be the magnitudes of them will just be so much greater so as you say we've got to get everybody thinking of moving to this this system risk approach and I think be interesting to hear more from you about that later but now we must move to to Chris Evans to talk about the some of the natural environment side of things Chris please thank you yes a slight change of tack but not completely so my background is very much from the emissions reporting from the land use sector and mitigation which which today has largely been about reducing emissions and it's worth saying that while trees are taking up carbon as Richard mentioned things like peatlands are still omitting so just getting that down is the first step but looking at the figure that he showed there's a long way to go from that to the kind of net sequestration that that is being factored into things like the sixth carbon budget and I think it's fair to say that a lot of that planning has not been particularly cognizant of climate change risk and current emissions inventory reporting doesn't take that into account so there are some challenges and I was just going to comment briefly really because I figured to get to questions on it on a few of the kind of potential where there are sort of win-wins and where there might be tension so I think it's fairly clear that restoring ecosystems through things like nature based solutions has the potential to sequester CO2 to store it fairly securely within within terrestrial league systems although that's not always the case whilst also conferring increased climate change resilience so I think there's a sort of fairly easy narrative there and that's touched on in the report but if we want to scale up land based removals well we have choices we can either put our eggs into things like direct air capture and carbon storage and that's a very energy hungry process and that relates back to what Emma was just talking about. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage that's that's generally viewed as an engineered solution but it needs biomass and at the moment that biomass is largely coming from North America that you probably saw that quite a lot of the forest caught fire this summer so in terms of climate change resilience and you know broader issues with international competition for biomass and supply change that there's a debating point at least whether that's a secure path to that zero or we have to use the UK landscape through a range of measures whether that's actually producing the biomass in country to feed becks or whether it's actually trying to sequester carbon through forestation or habitat restoration or other measures to do with things like changes of farming practices, enhanced weathering so putting basalt dust into the landscape to try and increase CO2 uptake through weathering processes producing and applying biochar as a recalcitrant store of carbon within the landscape and all of this though at risk of a slight spoiler alert we did a report for Bayes with element energy earlier this year which isn't published yet it should be imminently so I won't go into specifics but the general assessment was okay well this is how much kind of greenhouse gas removal is in the six carbon budget what would we have to do to go beyond that and thinking about both the engineered side and the land use side and and I guess the take home is that it starts to get really hard we live on a relatively highly populated and fairly small island or islands and we want a lot from our land we don't just want carbon we want food production we want all the other the value that people gain from the land but nature based solutions and rewilding and those kind of things aren't going to get us all the way to where we need to be so we there is a this is where the tension arises I think is that when we're not just talking about sort of cuddly nature based stuff we're talking about potential to to really have to industrialize to some extent both are also the forestry practices so I mean we're probably talking about you know exotic monocultures to produce the kind of yields that would be needed to feed becks or to or to put more wood into construction construction or we might be needing to think about how we really manage the land in other ways so bioenergy crops you know some of the work I do is looking at peat restoration but also if you want to go beyond that again you might be looking at sort of active carbon farming not just not just restoration to nature so although it's working with nature it might be sort of pushing it a little bit and clearly once you're starting to talk about monocultures and that kind of activity then you're clearly bringing in a degree of climate risk that if you've got a single species it's vulnerable to pests and diseases you know large conifer stands a uniform conifer stands at a risk of drought wind throw those kind of things so that's that's clearly a challenge at least thinking about and I guess the other one and it's factored into the sixth carbon budget is that what we don't want to do is to implement all these measures to capture carbon within the UK landscape whilst offshoring our food production to other countries because clearly that's going to lead to externalizing our greenhouse gas emissions somewhere else and bringing in a whole suite of additional climate risks to food supply chains so I think I'll probably stop there so that we can go on to questions but I mean my point is just that it's it's not a win-win there's some quite significant challenges here. Thank you very much Chris I think that brought home the adaptation challenge and the net zero nature challenge very very strongly indeed so we've now got some time for questions and it's great to see them appearing in the Q&A I thought I would kick off as I said but with the question if taking chairs prerogative to ask Mike Thompson who who led the work on the sixth carbon budget about how did how was sort of adaptation and climate risk taken into account in producing the sixth carbon budget and the net zero pathway Mike? Yeah thanks Julia so the sixth budget essentially is about mapping the path to net zero and it is built on a set of scenarios that we developed to be internally consistent to deal with all the challenges that we we face in the various bits of the system recognizing the constraints on our land on our energy system etc and of course we're looking 30 years ahead so the climate will change in that period we will have to make adaptations to that changing climate as well. We've been very vocal in CCC about the need for adaptation and mitigation to be integrated so yes we we tried to take that approach and walk the talk in developing our own scenarios so we tried to build that in and I should say those those scenarios are aiming to be the highest possible ambition of of action while also avoiding unnecessary disruption and we think that is absolutely vital to success if you followed our discussions on net zero and on the path to it you'll have heard us talk a lot about fairness about public engagement and about the kind of the need to avoid big surprises where things go wrong because those are the things that lose public consent and and those will be the things that put the transition off track I mean we should avoid them for their own sake but they also getting past them is necessary in order to deliver the target so we're trying to get ahead of this in the same kind of philosophy as the CCRA more generally I guess I'll pick out the three key areas where we where we built this into the scenario the first is land Chris has kind of talked about some of this obviously but essentially recognizing that the right tree in the right place will mean something different in the future to what it means now that the yield classes that we can get from forestry but also from agriculture will be different as the climate changes we need climate resilient crops and that changes how much yield we can get from them so we we allow for that and thinking about how much land we need for the different uses so that we can continue to feed people and to provide forestry products but we also recognize there's loads of synergies of course on the land side real opportunities in planting lots of trees and restoring lots of peatland to sequester more carbon and to get adaptation benefits and indeed wider biodiversity and ecosystem benefits so trying to recognize the possibility of those and developing scenarios that don't just focus on the sequestration need but on the the value that that those land use changes can bring you more generally and crucially of course we're modeling a baseline against the baseline that includes good adaptation so you cannot deliver the scenarios that we have if you have huge losses of sequestered carbon from your peatlands or from your existing forests so managing that and making the adaptation choices to avoid those possible losses is absolutely vital in delivering the the pathway overall. The second one then on the energy sector the the key thing we've looked at there is is the water demand so we've looked at well we're going to have a lot less thermal generation overall that generally helps but we'll also have more hydrogen production from electrolysis that has a water demand CCS generally has a higher water demand than a non CCS plant so allowing for those and what we find is that the balance of those if you do things in a sensible way is that you reduce the overall water use we think by about 10 but if you make daft choices like you don't put nuclear power stations by the coast but you put them somewhere where they'll need fresh water supplies well actually you could end up needing 20 more water so kind of thinking about the adaptation need at the point of investment at the point of planning is vital to make sure that the the overall system is deliverable and then the final one that we maybe haven't talked about a great deal so far is about the building sector so in 10 years time when we should be starting to wholesale put in low carbon heating systems heat pumps primarily district heating networks the world will already be a bit warmer at that point and that changes both the overall demand for heating and the size of the systems that you need to put in and so we've allowed for that in the scenarios that we've done that filters through to the costs filters through to the energy demand it filters through to the the design of the system overall and of course the other thing that's going on is that we will be undertaking a huge retrofit program of people's homes insulating them better switching them to low carbon heating and in doing that we must make sure that we don't exacerbate overheating risks and in fact where we can take the opportunities to make overheating risks reduce and indeed to to look at water efficiency to look at flood resilience so that when we're going into people's homes we're not going in again and again and repeatedly asking to do something different but as far as possible we're trying to design things in a good way from the start and we're trying to reduce the hassle and improve the lives and the comfort of people's homes as we go so we think you absolutely can deliver net zero can deliver the path we've provided it's been designed to be delivered in a changing climate in an adapting world but we need to we need to be honest about the challenges ahead we need to think about them we need to talk about them we need to understand them and then we need to prepare for them thank you very much Michael now I must move to the questions that are coming in and the most popular question is one that relates to that principle number five that Richard mentioned in his talk about the the unforeseen and unforeseen hazards and tipping points asking what to what extent does our assessment account for those and to what extent should we be preparing for catastrophic climate scenarios today and I think you know the situation in Germany earlier this year points to the fact that these unforeseen catastrophic events are already happening so Richard I don't know if you'd like to comment on that one yep sure so I think this CCRA actually gave a lot more focus to to these kinds of events than previous ones so we termed it low likelihood high impact events where you can capture this this variety of potential changes that could happen I think yeah the office did a good job trying to sort of map how these changes that are possible but not within this sort of typical cone how that could affect the risks I think it's an area where we can do more as well I think probably in in in several areas there's more work to be done to to understand you know look at these scenarios how do we map that into decision making and for me I think the real thing the good thing about decision making is to think well you're where the gates where you change your decision and to understand you are these possible scenarios that could still happen yeah still will they change your decisions and I think we can do more in the future to help build build out that in terms of linking it to make it more actionable I think it's also worth saying that you know there are there are still significant possibilities of these things that could happen and could have knock on effects in the UK one that's probably relevant for this discussion is you know that there's still possibilities of significant circulation change in the North Atlantic it could mean quite different wind patterns we're used to different storm patterns through the winter so again sort of thinking about electricity planning I think it's definitely useful to be aware that these outcomes are still in the set of outcomes that we have to consider as part of a prudent risk assessment and I think the the German experience says also I think says that you can have very good climate modelling but if you haven't got the early warning systems in place and indeed if you haven't educated the public so you get the right behaviors in response to warnings I think in Germany people moved into their basements thinking they would be be safer and and you know with terrible consequences so I think there's absolutely we need to be making sure that kind of that kind of thinking and planning is in place the the next most popular one is asks our thoughts on the way DEFRA's 25-year environment plan takes climate change adaptation and mitigation into consideration and I'll throw that one to you Chris if I may. I'd rather have asked something else. Sorry excuse me. Well I think it does I wouldn't want to comment on the detail because I haven't read it end to end but I mean clearly it's factored into the decision-making I guess the questions are about how it's how the kind of planning is turned into practice so you know particularly in the area I work in there's a lot of good intentions and a lot of ambition within the land area and a lot of it's being delivered through agri-environment schemes which is which is still to you know to a large extent optional. So you know getting farmers on board requires that the measures involved are not too challenging should we say and clearly from a farmer perspective you don't want to do things that bankrupt you so that's understandable but to achieve the sort of system level change in agricultural management that might deliver both garden sequestration and perhaps changes in resilience so it's quite hard to do that through a kind of opt-in system so to me that's where the biggest challenges lie is trying to and also often these things need to happen at a multiple farm scale so if one individual signs up at the native Jason's farm doesn't that may not help so it needs some thinking as to how you get from that and deliver the ambition that the scale is required. Thank you I'll throw that one to Mike as well from a mitigation perspective. Yeah I mean I think similar answer to Christopher I think vaguely it's the short answer and it's all about now how we translate into practice and have actual policies behind it to deliver the good intent I think we'd really like to see nice quantified measurable monitorable targets the intent of the bill is to set the direction I suppose with the policy to follow it but as we've seen in climate change if you have a really clear monitorable quantifiable target like an emissions target it's a lot easier to track progress against it than it sometimes has been on adaptation where the government hasn't said well actually we're aiming to deliver this precise level of reduction in this risk and this in another risk etc so that again goes back to our principles that's one of our key principles that we would like to see those quantified clear targets clear metrics that we can we can track progress against. Thank you then the next question is about water but it makes the point that Mike I think and Emma both made very well which was that we take into account the availability of water for the net zero particularly the energy technologies but what about the impact of increased hot or warm cooling water going into already warming riverine and estuarine environments and making them warmer still making the challenge even greater for the the nature that's in those environments so Emma is that something the industry is picking up. Yeah so in terms of risks that we look at for water firstly and actually ambient temperature we model where expecting increases to be both in terms of water temperature and air temperature and and and primarily naturally for industry the risks to our infrastructure of those changes but the the general sense is that existing operations fit within that that kind of what will be an on average relatively narrow range of increase I don't know I honestly don't know how much they're thinking about the environmental impact of them of putting warmer water into those systems again I think that's a really good interdependency and a different way of thinking about the sectors interdependencies that we we need to pick up just just in general the biggest risks to energy security and the resilience of our infrastructure tend to be where we get these swings and fluctuations so with water it's you know flooding or drought or you know in terms of the coast coastal erosion so change in the kind of volume of water is still it's still the most significant thing that we're dealing with and out to see it things like storms or heat waves or sudden periods of cooling but it's a really good point about our impact on on the environment in that way so I can pick it up you know it's one of the things that we should be considering great so we've sent Emma back with some questions for her industry I don't know Chris is that something you would be interested in commenting on commenting on no I'll pass on that one I think okay we've got the really interesting questions we've got a fabulous one here from Freya Roberts which is it's very simply how do we go from acknowledging these numerous high risks to acting on the risks and how do we get people to act so Mike I'll start with you on that one it's a really tough one isn't it yeah I mean there's no magic wand is there I think I mean policy ultimately is the thing that we need because we are talking about some changes that otherwise we won't necessarily adapt to I think there are things you can do you know the energy sector obviously is thinking about the things in its control but not everything is within its control so particularly I think when you get down to the environmental risks then you you naturally are in an area of externalities an area of market failures and of a system that fundamentally doesn't price what we're trying to achieve so the answer to that normally is that you have policy response to drive the actions that you're trying to to encourage and we have some of it in some areas but we have lots of gaps at the moment is kind of the honest answer I think we're trying to work up an interesting thing at the moment which is to try and just map much more the theory of change through from policy through to the actions we need the outcomes we're looking for in the different areas and then ultimately the managing of climate risk this is all kind of bundled in I think with that vision of what does a well adapted UK look like and and how do we then go about achieving it and delivering it but I think ultimately a real combination of policy leaders and I guess drawing on the experience of where the successes have come in net zero the policy works when you're pretty clear what you're trying to achieve when you you pay for things that need to be paid for and won't be paid for in the market and you tackle the barriers to action and the barriers to action then we're getting into how the public respond how individuals respond if we're getting into land you land owners and farmers you've got lots of complicated issues around tendencies etc that you need to get in and tackle as well so good well designed policy that is thinking about the the people it's trying to affect and what will drive their behaviour I think it's fundamentally what we're looking for but there's no metric what and to wave to get there there's a lot of work to do it I think Emma have you got any quick thoughts on that one yeah so so quick thoughts it's very difficult to get people to picture the long term that's the fundamental challenge of climate change it's hard for us to picture these impacts and even when they happen I think the natural human tendency is to see them as a one-off rather than part of a kind of bigger pattern is right it's it's so difficult to do but that said just in addition to what Mike's saying you know policy really really does work it's it's easier with large infrastructure so one of the reasons the energy sector traditional energy sector is doing this is our plan is up for 25 years so we're used to thinking about 25 year lifespans and and the policy has focused on that kind of infrastructure there are two other big pressures on industry to change one is our investors so even if you're not building big infrastructure if you're building things like EV charging or you're retrofitting people's homes the money for that is increasingly coming from investors who themselves are worried about climate risk and want businesses to do something about it so looking at the investor community in ESG then drives changes in the private sector and the last one is public license to operate and I think we're increasingly saying that as the public understand impacts in their own communities homes environments that they are requiring industry to do more in return for you know being able to operate and I think we'll see more of that over the next decade as we're starting to see impacts bite so just to give you a very quick example I live in east London we have flooding this this year I live in a neighborhood where there's been a lot of debate about no traffic neighborhoods it was interesting that people immediately made the link from flooding to infrastructure being designed around cars and asking local government for more adaptive infrastructure just that kind of weather event triggered a really big change in the debate locally about what we needed from our own infrastructure so I would imagine public pressure will also do some of this over the next next 10 years it's a shame isn't it that we have to have a disaster to get that that pressure though I must I must bring things to a close now so thank all of our speakers very much indeed thank the audience for some brilliant questions and I'm really sorry we didn't get to answer more of them because there are some really thoughtful questions which we will look through after the event and finally can I thank the whole of the CCC team for all of the hard work that goes into producing these really important reports and I just finally like to remind everybody that the last in our series of these seminars on adaptation is next week and it's on international risks and we've heard of it today about how important some of the international risks are so please let me encourage you to sign up for that one and we'll look forward to seeing you again next week please so thank you everybody very much indeed and goodbye