 Hi everybody, welcome to the second webinar in the Climate Change Committees UK climate risk state-of-the-nation series this time on the importance of nature and land use. We're just waiting for the numbers to level off so if you despair with us for a few few more seconds and then we'll get started. Thanks very much. Hi everyone, welcome to the second webinar in the climate change committees UK climate change risk state-of-the-nation series and this time on importance of nature and land use. We're about to get started but we're just waiting for the numbers to level off so bear with us for a few more seconds. Morning everyone, I think the numbers have leveled off so welcome to the second webinar in the climate change committees UK climate risk state-of-the-nation series. My name is Professor Kate Jones, I'm Professor Ecology and Biodiversity at University College London and I'm also acting here as an expert for the climate change committee. So I'm very excited that to be chairing this session on importance of nature and land use in climate risk and adaptation. So this series in essence tries to unpack and explain some of the really key risks identified in the number of reports that we've done recently specifically the technical report and then on top of that we had an advice report which tried to unpick some of the really key messages from the technical report and give that to to Parliament. So that was the advice report and that was our kind of from our experts of the UK independent assessment of climate change risk. So throughout this series we're going to be pulling out some key sectors exposed to these priority risks and some of the key challenges raised in the assessment and one of these is you know one of the main ones was the importance of nature and land use. So in this seminar we're going to first have a presentation covering the natural environment and assets chapter of the third climate change risk assessment technical report and this will be given by the lead authors for this chapter who are joining us. Thank you very much. So that's Pam Berry of the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford and Ian Brown of the University of Dundee. So they'll take it in turns to give you the key salient points from that report and then we're joined by Brandon Freeman from the Climate Change Committee Secretary at and he'll present a summary of the advice report that we wrote on top of that produced by the Climate Change Committee. So then after the presentations we'll have a couple of short responses from our two other panelists and that's Oli Watt, Oli Watt from the RSPB and Jenny Phelps from the Gloucestershire Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group. So it kind of gives you a couple of different viewpoints on our presentations and then of course we're going to allow plenty of time for the Q&A and if you're joining through the Zoom webinar please submit your questions in the Q&A box. So if you just click the link you can post your questions there and I think we've just got a little message there from the Secretary about some instructions so just have a quick look at that. Okay so the Secretary is suggesting to keep them short so that we have only a limited time for questions so be good to keep them stopping. Okay great now over to Pam and Ian thank you very much for joining us. Pleasure to have you here. Thank you and good morning. I'm pleased to be going to take you through the message we used to carry out the risk assessment and the couple of headline findings before focusing on two risks to nature and then I'll pass over to my co-chapter leading ground who will go through some of the risks associated with land use. Next slide please. So each chapter in the climate change risk assessment was set the same exam question on the risks and opportunities and vulnerability posed by climate change and the adaptation actions taken and their effectiveness and we tackled the exam question in three steps firstly looking at what are the current and future levels of risk so what's the magnitude of risk then we looked at what adaptation actions have been taken and how are they able to reduce this risk and then we're looking at what further action is needed. Next slide please. So we had multiple lines of evidence used to support these steps and I expect many of you were involved in one or more of these for example through supplying evidence on the impacts of climate change or information on adaptation actions or maybe you participated in the stakeholder workshops or reviewed the chapter so thank you for your contribution. The climate change committee also commissioned some specific research reports to provide additional information and support for the assessment so for example the threshold project searched the literature for evidence of climate driven thresholds in the natural environment and their impacts then used the UK CP 18 scenarios and modeled how these thresholds might change in the future and how they might impact particular risks to natural environment. Next slide please. So what was new in the climate change risk assessment third round? One of the things that's very important for the natural environment chapter were the interacting and cross cutting risks as obviously the environment is fundamentally interconnected and therefore managing individual risks or opportunities in isolation can have major secondary effects on other risks. Thus while the risks and opportunities have been assessed individually as per the CCLA 3 method many of the interactions are actually looked at in the matter part of this chapter. Another new aspect was looking at net zero and how that would affect the natural environment but also how the natural environment can contribute to achieving net zero. We also looked more at notable events or low frequency high magnitude events and of course we had greater emphasis on what was going on in the different countries. Next slide please. Overall in the risk assessment there were 61 risks and opportunities of which 18 pertain to the natural environment and 12 of the natural environment risks were assessed as having the highest urgency score as shown in red here and another five especially the opportunities as needing further investigation to build the evidence of the impacts of climate change and the effectiveness of adaptation actions. Next slide please. Overall 56% of the risks had the highest urgency score i.e. more action needed and this is compared with 36% in the second assessment but it's interesting to note that of that 56% to thirds related to risks within the natural environment so this is obviously a very important area to look at. Next slide please. This just shows you what the 18 risks were and how they were assessed by country it was very difficult to make country distinctions given species don't respect political boundaries. Next slide please. So moving into two of the specific risks firstly looking at the risk to terrestrial species and habitats this urgency score hasn't changed from CCRA2 but I think the amount of evidence of from observations and modelling studies has increased and additionally we found more evidence on the impact of high impact low likelihood events such as severe and sustained droughts and one of the other things which mirrors what was done in CCRA2 or what was found in CCRA2 is the differential species responses in terms of the way species respond and the rate at which they respond and this obviously leads to changes in habitat composition and functioning with ramifications rule ecosystem services and while we were focused on the risks in this particular element what was especially of concern as well was the opportunities for some species such as those with sudden distributions or those with more than one generation a year and it was also very difficult to disentangle climate drivers of changes that were observed from other multiple stresses and I think this is a common theme throughout the chapter and I think it's something that Ian will pick up on. Next slide please. The other risk which I'm going to cover in terms of the natural environment is the risk to freshwater species and habitats and this change from being a research priority in CCRA2 to more action needed due to an increasing amount of evidence on specific impacts and also while CCRA2 identified freshwater habitats as being particularly vulnerable to reduced water availability freshwater species and biodiversity are highly sensitive to the direct and indirect impacts of temperature as well and this was picked up more in CCRA3. So for the freshwater climate change impacts on freshwater species and habitats occurs who increase temperatures so for obligate aquatic species water temperature is particularly important whereas for some other species air temperatures are also important such as the water birds and also the changes in pattern of rainfall and river flow have not on effects for nutrient impact nutrient inputs and nutrient cycling and these may affect neutralification impacts and affect spatiochemical changes in species distribution so again climate change is likely to impact the state of the freshwater ecosystems and regulation services and interacting stresses again are particularly important. Next slide please. So thinking about the sort of second step there are a whole range of adaptation actions that have been proposed or undertaken many of which overlap with general nature recovery but often it takes a long time for these to have an effect. So while there's now a reliable evidence base for developing and implementing adaptation plans we do like robust metrics or indicators and appropriate long-term monitoring to sort of measure the effectiveness of many of these actions and so given there's limited evidence of effectiveness of adaptation we deemed that this was not fully meeting the need to manage the risks and so I think as mentioned earlier consistent with the ecosystem approach we recognised that the intercom activity of the natural environment and managing risks in isolation is not the best way forward so one of the objectives for this chapter was to try and develop a more systemic approach to these interrelationships and to how they affect other chapters and this is something we cover at the end of the chapter. They'll now pass on to Ian who will take you through some of the risks to land use and draw this section to a close. Thank you Ian. Yes thanks Pam so I'm moving on to soils now and actually soils is at the interface of biodiversity issues and land use issues so soils in this case is doubly important so this is one of the risks that we identified is going from medium at present to high in the future under all scenarios and I should say here in terms of assessing medium at present that's based upon the evidence that was available to the CCRA and there's particular challenges in terms of applying the general CCRA methodology to the natural environment and particularly to soils and that's because climate change is acting with a range of other stresses particularly through land use so separating out the climate change effect is quite difficult although we have good evidence in terms of the risks in terms of what impact we're actually getting now and from that we can project a quite serious change in risks into the future under our businesses as usual type scenario and particular implications for the many ecosystem services that depend on soils and so in terms of adaptation we identified lots of examples of maladaptation which is effectively moving the risk elsewhere or increasing the risk through implementing wrong strategy and the current adaptation it's good that soils are getting a lot of attention now but the actual adaptation on the ground is still very limited and often concentrated on particular soils such as deep peat so it's not just the full range of peat much of the emphasis is on just deep peat so we identified that this is a risk meeting more action and you can see there are some examples that we provided in terms of actions that we think will be beneficial particularly through changes in land use and land management and I think one particular issue I'd like to emphasise is soils soils are very complex and variable and we can come up with sort of quite general principles but what we really need is targeted advice targeted support schemes and what we need is the data to go with that in terms of monitoring to understand what works best in particular context so we often say for adaptation context is important and context is critical but particularly for soils next slide please so the next topic is agricultural productivity this is both crops and livestock for the CC area we combined agriculture and forestry but here I'm going to separate them out because there's some particular it's quite distinct issues although really they should be both considered together as examples of different land uses so this is not the one where assessing the risk going from medium at present to high in the future the risks predominate and that's risks in terms of changes in yield and changes in the productive area of land which is linked to land capability but also changes in particular individual constituents such as for example the protein content of particular crops or in some cases for example the energy content which is becoming important in terms of for example bioenergy crops and one thing I think that we picked out more in CC area three compared to previous CC areas is the effects of changing seasonal and yearly variability so you know we often have this sort of what seems like a shift between good and bad years and land managers and farmers have particular problems in terms of understanding how that has implications in terms of planning for the future so that's I think certainly something to look at more in the future and obviously there's big issues in terms of productivity in terms of the effect on the on the wider supply chain both for food and drink but also more and more for bioenergy so in terms of adaptation another one we identified well I think this is the one where we probably identified the most limitations on adaptation particularly at farm level the emphasis is mainly still on reactive responses and some examples of maladaptation as well and one of the problems we had was we had quite a lot of anecdotal examples of adaptation but we have very limited systematic surveys of the level of adaptation occurring across the country so we can understand different regional patterns and that information is particularly limited on new crops and new cultivars which in some cases might be providing quite important opportunities so that links to the actions we've recommended in terms of linking with our assessment of urgency so more emphasis on systematic national surveys of attitudes and practices better advice better outreach on the evolving risks and opportunities and that they needed to be spatially targeted and I think that links to the point I've just made about soils that we have particular local context that we need to understand better there's an important link between these local level assessments and national level assessments and I think there's more there needs to be more emphasis on the use of particular planning tools so I've mentioned land capability there and there's some really good work happening which I'd like to highlight particularly in Wales through the climate suitability capability program which is showing how tools like that can be used to plan for the future in a different way and just one final example I can mention there is to look at where's we can shorten the lead times between research and development implementation so particularly for this sector there's sometimes quite long lead times between the initial sort of research and how that's and finally implemented with field and farm level next slide please so quickly to summarize the next one which is on forest productivity so this one similar to agriculture increased risk potential opportunities there being new species adaptation there's a bit more emphasis on longer term planning and particularly with forestry a good link with multifunctional land use but also we identified some examples there of path dependency and maladaptation and the same issue in terms of the information on adaptation is often quite limited and similar issues in terms of where more action is needed so particularly emphasis on advice and outreach linked to a different risk and opportunities and to encourage innovation and diversification and I think as the point I've just made in terms of linking the different land use sectors together better so trying to dissipate the balance between agriculture and forestry next slide please so we set we have a separate assessment of pests pathogens and invasives and this is one where there is a bit more adaptation so we have got established risk assessment procedures and they're quite good at identifying existing threats but what we're particularly concerned about here is it emergent risks so a thing is that I'm not yet on the radar but we know that can spread across the landscape quite fast once they become established so the key issue in terms of requiring more action is to step up I think surveillance horizon scanning link this to more cross sectoral contingency planning and link this to land use and particularly developments like integrated pest management next slide please and so the next one was coasts so another one we assess is going from medium to high in the future and a particular issue here that is important is as you've seen with the recent UK climate projections 2018 is that sea level rise projections are now being revised upwards so we've got same issue in terms of adaptation there's limited adaptation actually occurring in the present not as often an emphasis on business as usual but there are some quite prominent good examples of what could be doing with long-term planning that includes climate change and we'd like to encourage more of them and there's particularly important policy developments at the moment for example through the SNP a short-term management plan refresh for England and Wales and through dynamic coast in Scotland and I think what we'd like to see is for the natural environment a stronger emphasis on nature-based solutions through these policy processes and to link them with local land use decisions and to include a range of different climate change scenarios not just one assumed pathway into the future next slide please so we had a separate assessment of carbon storage and greenhouse gases and this is including not just direct climate effects through changes in warming and moisture patterns but also the effects of past pathogens, wildfire risks and also through the impact of climate change and yields and assumed plans for for example through lands bearing so the risks predominate here but there's also important opportunities and this is one where I think we'd really like to emphasize adaptation at the moment is very limited a lot of the mitigation and net zero assessments seem to assume stationary climate which is a bit ironic and in some cases there's examples of maladaptation where they're actually increasing the risk so what we're suggesting in terms of further action is a further stress test of proposed plans for carbon storage and greenhouse gases against different climate change scenarios to collect and pool data on what works best in different contexts and to develop better and more meaningful indicators and to include all land use of soils and habitats not just the current emphasis on peat and woodland but also include for example intensive agriculture. Next slide please. Ian sorry to interrupt I'm just really conscious that we want to give some time at the end for questions so maybe can you just just run through the last few slides quite quickly. This Thursday the one on landscape carrier which brings everything together this one's particularly important at a local level because local landscapes mean quite a lot to local communities and it often includes intangible effects so I included the natural England landscape wheel there to include all the different aspects that are included and we'd definitely like to see more action on this particularly to link local with national scale action. So the final slide thank you it's just to summarize the importance of land use and the key thing about land use affects all the risks that were looked at in chapter three and that includes marine as well which obviously should be a priority and also the other chapters so land use is pivotable to positive action across a full range of risks but it's usually very slow to change and I think what we're suggesting and we had a section at the end of the report in terms of how we need to bring this together with a more systems based approach across scales and to more fully link it with the net zero agenda and not just to frame things in terms of illusionary certainty such as fixed targets so that's the finish thank you. Thanks Pamine and so thanks for really clear presentation of the technical report it is an extraordinary document and I think you've really tried to distill the the main pieces there so there are some really fantastic questions really hard questions in the Q&A so please add more in as you go so thanks very much to Pamine and I just want to hand over to Brendan so Brendan's on the CCC sectariat and he's going to talk about the advice report that we did to kind of distill some of those big big points that they've raised in the independent assessment risk assessment. Any thanks Kate and good morning to everyone I'm now going to provide you with a very quick overview of the relevant sections of the advice reports that relate to the natural environment in land use if you could move on one slide please okay so just to give you a bit of background as to the advice report the report itself lays out the adaptation committees statutory advice to governments on the priorities for their forthcoming national adaptation plans and wider actions it doesn't summarize all of the six one risks and opportunities in detail but it does provide a synthesis of the cross cutting issues that emerge now as you can see from the diagram the report itself feeds from a vast pool of material now that included the technical reports of the seven chapters including back for the natural environment which Ian and Pam have gone through national summaries for each of the A's we also have 17 back sheets that summarize different themes and we also commissioned six research projects specifically to help us fill evidence gaps so in short this is the committee's independent take on the extensive range of evidence and produced in the advice reports governance next slide please okay so as Pam and Ian noted the CCRA's technical chapter identified six one risks that need to be addressed in the next adaptation adaptation plans national adaptation plans and the ccc was asked by government to give its advice on the most urgent priorities now during on the 61 the committee has highlighted eight priorities that must be acted on in the next two years and the prioritization was based on expert judgment and focused on a number of factors these included things such as urgency of action so where risks and opportunities were identified as with the highest urgency score they also considered risks and opportunities where the largest gaps in adaptation policy exist the importance of integrating adaptation into major policy commitments so looking at things such as net zero the environmental land management scheme so ensuring adaptation is given sufficient consideration also avoiding lock-in so ensuring that decisions do not lock in policies and technology this are not resilient and finally areas where there are clear opportunities for progress during the current parliament so things such as the environment bill where it's essential that we ensure it's fit for purpose through climate proofing it both now and into the future now the eight priority areas the committee identified four of those related to the natural environment and these included risk terrestrial freshwater habitats and species risks to soil health and increased flooding and drought risks to natural carbon stores and sequestration leading to greater emissions and risks to crops livestock and commercial trees from a range of different hazards next slide please so as mentioned previously the importance of integrating adaptation into major policy commitments was one of the factors considered by the committee when they're identifying the eight key priorities and one of the major policy commitments of course over the next 12 months will be net zero so the advice report emphasised that achieving this goal effectively will require a dual approach so not only reducing emissions but also ensuring we adapt to the changing climate and this will require a range of different integrated approaches both for adaptation and net zero so looking at things like mixed tree species planting ensuring the right tree is planted in the right place doing more extensive peaking and restoration etc but of course in order for the natural environment to provide this vital support it will be key it must be in a good enough condition and as the assessment notes this isn't necessarily the case at the moment so the evidence indicates that soil health is increasingly impacted by climate related hazards such as flooding and drought also heavier rainfall is causing erosion and compaction in our soils the UK's picklands and wetlands will also be vitally important as they're a significant store of co2 however the area of land suitable for heat forming vegetation in the UK's uplands faces serious risks so the analysis has shown that there's a possible decline of between 50% and 65% by the 2050s due to climate change alone this will have a serious impact on these habitats ability to store and suppress carbon now the productive agricultural and forestry sectors will also be essential to the delivering net zero not to mention other key policy objectives such as food supply both now and in the future however the assessment concludes climate change poses a direct risk to crops livestock and commercial trees from a range of different threats including heat stress drought stress water logging etc our wildfire is particularly significant and there's already worrying trends through which have been coming through indicators that we've used in our recent assessment so it's found that in 2019 alone there was reported the highest ever number of wildfire incidents in the UK since records began in 2008 to an area of 30,000 hectares in size so that's in relative terms the size of a region of Liverpool so I guess the resounding message from this is that we will not be able to rely on nature to suppress the decline unless we ensure that our peat trees and our wetlands are healthy next slide please okay so what can be done to reduce vulnerability to climate change across the key priorities identified by the committee so the assessment highlights the importance of nature-based solutions or NBS and this can take many forms and I've touched on a number of them already in previous slides but these can include restoring peatlands so both for the carbon sequestration and carbon storage abilities but also the range of other services it provides I think such as water filtration and habitat provision also increasing woodland planting rates but ensuring that the right trees are planted in the right places also planting more trees near waterways to ensure that the freshwater habitats and species have shade things such as that and tempering or limiting high water temperatures and also in terms of urban environments so green infrastructure so this can range from large large scale down to the smaller scales such as green roofs okay next slide please okay so I guess an important point to note is that adaptation is happening the concern however is that no evidence shows the gap between the level of risk we face and the level of adaptation underway has also widened now the UK does have the capacity and the resources to respond effectively to these risks and the government needs to take the lead in implementing the action needed but the assessment finds its response has as yet to date not been sufficient in fact it's noted in both the assessment and our most recent progress report that adaptation has yet to be successfully integrated across government on a more positive note there's scarcely been a better time to strengthen the design of policies to support adaptation and the current review of the environmental policy following a departure from the EU as well as the higher priority given to restoring nature means that now there's now a time limited opportunity to build adaptation explicitly into the policies that our natural environment needs and also the services that provides next slide please okay so I've spoken about the types of adaptation actions that need to be taken but for adaptation to be effective understanding how we frame and plan the actions required to address the risk is as important as the actions taken so in addition to assessing risks and thinking about the benefits of acting now the committee also reviewed the evidence and adaptation gap in the risk assessment from that committee has recommended 10 principles of good adaptation planning and these should form the basis of the next round of adaptation national adaptation plans so to be clear these are intended to bring adaptation into the mainstream into mainstream consideration both for government and business now some of these principles are about good long-term planning such as into integrating adaptation into other policies planning for a two and four degree warming levels and preparing for unpredictable extremes as noted in the independent assessment others are about making good decisions that maximize benefits and costs so avoiding locking things such as that of all these principles now all of these principles need to sit within a vision for a well adapted UK so there is a clear aim and underpinned by proper resources and metrics unfortunately this isn't always a given and it certainly hasn't been the norm for the UK in the last 10 years as the report shows okay thank you very much thanks Brendan that was brilliant and I'm we're really lucky to be joined by a couple of panellists to give some expert opinion on the report so I just want to firstly go to Olly Watts and then come on to Jenny Phelps so Olly please give us your thoughts thanks Kate and I'll try and be quick because we need time for questions too although this may answer one or two of the questions so good morning everybody so it's really striking that nature is really at risk from climate change you look at the big chart of the 61 risks climate uh sorry species in habitat top left hand corner N1 really really important so we know we're in a nature crisis we know we're in a climate crisis these things too are absolutely interlinked and I think the question to ask is why is this gap of adaptation widening when we know that we have these two big problems and I just wonder whether some of it is down to our mindset and the language that we use nature conservation is all about what we move from protection to conservation we haven't yet moved to before we're looking and the mindset is still a restoration recovery regeneration and redoing a lot of things and one of those is a word I'm not very keen on in terms of adaptation which is resilience because I don't think it's forward looking enough and this is not just for the nature this is societal too and another thing which is also societal is that the way that we do things at the moment actually works in the conservation terms in the places where we can use it for example on the nature reserves so we're used to doing things in the rights you know in a way that we have familiarity with and which works and again we need to move forward from that again in nature conservation we're actually quite exciting times at the moment with some novel approaches um I think talking about networks rewilding nature based solutions and so on and so forth and yet the adaptation gap is still widening so that's why I'm really heartened to see the advice from the Committee on Climate Change Committee to adapt for a two degree world and assess for a four because I think this I think this is hugely important I think this provides a firm place to look at into the future and to change the mindset not just to do things as we are but to accept and understand this pathway and trajectory of change that we're on that one of pan slides about the temperature threshold really showed clearly and we have to now look at life in an adaptation of change nature conservation has to understand change in a way that we've never had before as as Manila societal risks do too and that's why it's quite keen to see NA team looking at landscape characters in a new light and actually the burn convention requires us of our nature reserves to understand change and imagine the future so doing all this I think well it is really really important and I think it I would like to see us change from looking at kind of change as a negative response building resilience against things and resilience is about coming back from things to actually having a positive outlook not quite as one of the questions that's come in is our speeches moves on quite opportunities in a way they are in some respects but at least to embrace change and make the best of change because this is the world that we are now living in and I think the two degree world provides a really important milestone to understand that and make the best in our adaptation for both nature and for people thanks. Thanks Olly some really great stuff there Jenny can I quickly turn to you I know there are loads of great questions that we want to get to so please go ahead Jenny thanks for coming thank you very much indeed I just would like to thank the author of this report I think it's the most extraordinary evidence that we need to be able to be the foundation for urgent climate action and response from the government it also picks up on the lack of coordinated response we've had from the government already and that how that could be we can offer an opportunity of how that could be systemised it eludes the fact we do need a systems approach to delivering this at a local level but acting in a global context we already have that in the research and evaluated framework that's been out there that we developed over 15 years ago now that the local delivery and joining things up at a local level is the only way we can integrate this action and that there's a template that we use at a county level that is bespoke that actually can enable this to be transferable and locally relevant which the report also eludes to that need for adaptation at a local level integration at a local level and the main the need we have is for urgently having advisors out climate action advisors who can work to join up some social economic and environmental needs of taking this action and we can particularly working with the geospatial commission and looking at very much systemising the role of organic matter in soils regenerative agriculture have a template of working with groups of farmers with groups of parishes building climate action at a local level but actually responding to local plans that have declared climate emergencies county councils that are now going to have low quality recovery strategies and integrating post-COVID economic recovery into our social economic and environmental requirements post-Brexit with all the changes in environmental policy so I'd just like to say we do have a framework for action we'd love to share it with you we think that it's long overdue we've been championing a local approach for a very long time and what I would really like to call for is at least a thousand climate emergency officers out there to enable social capital to be released for people worrying about eco anxiety to be able to take action working with their farm and communities to have transformative regenerative approaches and finally I'd like to say I think our record centres need to be funded so that our whole society can understand where nature is and how they can act to protect it and without that evidence being available in a free form for our communities and farmers to know how we can protect species the movement of species management to the landscape for water soil and habitat connectivity we need to know where our species are and have that freely available to us so thank you so much for this report it really will be a foundation for us hopefully enabling joined up local delivery on the ground so thank you very much. Thanks Jenny and Ollie and all of the panelists and the speakers just now it's really great to have you know the land use owners land owners farmers and the NGOs together on the panel it's really brilliant for you to be here so I'm just going to start to look at the question and answers and some really brilliant questions some of which have been answered already but there was one which I thought was really interesting I think we should should just talk about and it's from Mark Jacob who asked whether the panel have identified evidence gaps which they would recommend our prioritise and I know that we talked a lot about this in the committee so so maybe Ian or Pam or Brendan would like to have a go at that. Well I think as I sort of put in my responses and as I said in my presentation I think for me the number one is gathering sound evidence on the effectiveness of individual adaptation actions because I think as being said you know adaptation actions are very context dependent as well given the heterogeneity of the natural environment and so I think if we have a better understanding of what works where and how effective it is and how we can make them more effective that for me I think is the number one and ties in with Jenny's point about sort of you know local records office and so on because they can help to perhaps provide that and provide also some evidence on monitoring. Ian. Yeah I think Pam's sort of said exactly what I was going to say but particularly the emphasis on linking that to monitoring as a sort of systematic scale and we often put in terms of understanding what works where and when and we really need to do that at a much larger scale to understand what's really happening. Holly you had Joe you wanted to comment. Yeah very quickly I think we need to understand more about what the two-degree world looks like and I would love to see an indicative nature map for the UK as a two-degree average global temperature rise so we can start to plan for where things will be and where we can make what actually the best of nature looks like about future time but and it's what we're two or three decades away so we get on with that now we can actually then do it on the ground. Brendan did you want to add anything? No just to repeat really what Harmony had said I mean the monitoring side of things is is a clear evidence gap but not just in terms of the actions I mean they are very important but throughout the whole process so identifying the actions that are being taken how they are effectively being delivered but also the impact that they're having so how they're reducing risk I think the the issue here is clearly identifying the links between impact and reductions in vulnerability so any research that we can have in that area I think would be really helpful. Thanks I'm just going to skip on to another question which was upvoted quite a lot by a lot of people and that was about which organisations do you think have the most power to influence adaptation in terms of nature and land use? Who was? I don't like the word power the only way we're going to solve this is through collaboration and respecting and valuing every organisation's role to do this together and what you need to do that is to have people on the ground who can value not only local knowledge local resource every type of knowledge but all the organisations that have an essential role to play a part and I think that this is the really thing that worries me about this is sort of that the human species we seem to see this as a competition with each other that actually you know somebody's going to be achieving something better than we are and we just have to dismiss that and do this together and I think that the collaboration is absolutely key and and it would be cost beneficial for the Treasury we've in our work that we found that over every community has over 75 interested parties wanting to do something in that locality none of there's nobody's job to join that up there's hundreds of different organisations who want to play a part but actually joining that up at a local level would be so cost beneficial and training these advisors is what we urgently need to do I've been doing it for five years but we need the resource to do it so people can act now and the funding the resource that is out there to do this the knowledge the expertise at practical academic and institutional level is there we just need to coordinate it and that's why I don't like the word power because it's not a competition thank you I guess it's really interesting that you think that what I think the goodwill is then you think the goodwill is there it's just that we need to get a bit more organised to kind of understand how to operationalize that so that is really inspirational really okay so let's go to a question by David Danoon does the water framework directive effectively consider climate change of freshwater impacts and adaptation and I know that Brendan has looked at a lot of these frameworks over the last few months so maybe you want to take that one yeah sure um I guess my answer is in part so in certain respects it's um it's very solid looking at certain risks and when you're looking at risks and water scarcity it does have the correct um elements to it in terms of targets in terms of research into impacts um in a two and four degree world it has a set of actions so it's solid in that respect however it's limited in that it doesn't look at the full range of risks so when we think about things such as fire water temperatures and impacts on freshwater habitats um it's largely ignored to an extent or at least it's not covered to the extent we would like to see so I think we do need some mechanism in place that clearly guides our response to risks from higher water temperatures because that's one of the key risks facing freshwater waters thank you um I really like to move on to the next one so I want to bring in all the voices here especially Jenny and Ollie to think about this um but they this kind of new agricultural acts and this new deffra framing initiative farming initiative so what what likely impact is it going to be so I guess this is talking about Elms and also the agricultural act so that's Megan Alexander that's that so please you have Jenny thank you um yeah I've been involved in the um Elms engagement group in England for for four and a half years and one of the things we're trying to get the government to understand is that we need a common platform we've been recommending the use of UK habitat classification because it not only classifies land use but also the way that it's managed working and assessing the ecological function of land management with Rothamstead and others welcome everyone in that space but the point is that if you're going to be able to have a common framework that you want to build your all your different organizational opportunities for that Elm needs to fit within that so biodiversity net gain carbon trading all need to be part of that common framework at the moment we're finding that that the ambition for co-design is is sort of losing track slightly on the ground we know what Elm needs to do it needs to catalyze the opportunity for blended finance and natural capital recovery um and it's not doing that it's got rather stuck so we're trying to help the government work at a sort of county level so that it can work out how it can invest and catalyze uh farmers to be able to record the state of the environment actively and dynamically now record species work with communities and start to be able to blend finance from multiple sources so we can make rapid changes to the state of our natural capital habitats and species on the ground at the moment that's not quite happening we're still working on it um but yes Elm needs to be the catalyst not displace these other opportunities it'd be really great to get some other views on that Ollie and Pam not much so I'd really have to tell you to play the expert now but it really doesn't need to be it really doesn't need to be forward looking to embrace all the aspects of land management in a way that the Elm can never really did um and that's that's a big ambition and the RSPB is also pushing for change in that direction as well um let's hope Defra can take up that mission and one sort of point I would add would be to um really emphasize the links between the skills so going particularly from uh field and farm skill to landscape skill and encouraging more cooperation at that level and if I made this respond I mean the template that we have now is of of water bodies all the landowners of every field parcel in a water body working with groups of parishes and I think you could do this anywhere to enable the individual farm businesses to collaborate together to share resources and to come together to change but we need a transitional fund to enable that adaptation to take place and it's a really difficult time for farmers because they want to keep food resilience at the heart of what we need to do as well and we can do that through regenerative agriculture but it's a big shift it's a big oil tanker to turn and we need the alignment from supermarkets we need new localization of food supplies we need dynamic procurements we can see with ecosystem function attribution to land how we might even crack food equality we could make you know nutrient dense food affordable for all and we can see how to do this and it's very frustrating because it's a template that could quite easily be duplicated by aligning at a county level you know your local nature partnerships your local economic partnerships creating a natural capital local nature recovery integrating opportunities at a very local level but to join these up in a national and international context and the system is out there and that's what we've been delivering with but trying to get the government to to adopt a systems approach seems really challenging and we need to override that and show the cost benefit to the treasury of that action because you're releasing enormous amounts of social capital people want to act on climate change they want to look after the peace of the world that they care about but in a way that has a global impact and and we can do this we just need the support from the government or from anywhere to get these advisors out there trained and facilitating action thank you thank you thanks Jenny you touched on regenerative agriculture then that's a question by Ruth Montfries that she's been asking about what's the role of regenerative agriculture in adaptation I think it's got a really big role but it would be really good to to kind of get some views on that from the panel I'm not a huge I don't know an awful lot about farming but it's quite clear that farming needs to change and it's really important in very many different ways and I'm just touching what you're saying earlier Jenny while some people do want change there's also a big mindset shift that we need farmers as you said want to produce food and I'm on the lowland agriculture task force and there are people who know what we're where we need to get to but there's a massive mindset change job to get there to actually achieve that maybe regenerative agriculture is part of the pathway but regenerative agriculture from our perspective you know is a global initiative that we all see as being the ideal that we can actually regenerate the ecology of our soils that underpins ecological recovery we can build organic matter for water quality and air quality mitigating against floods and we can produce nutrient dense food and we can do all these things and regenerative agriculture is able to help us to do that what we need is the other mechanisms to enable farmers to transition to that we could which we can also see but I think the frustration with it for me at the moment is that it's really difficult for these farmers to transition to this they can see they can see where they want to be but it needs investment and that will also really impact on the messages that you give because we need to do that we need livestock in the system we need a pasture fed grazing livestock that's what we'll build our soil and build our organic matter and the message that's sort of less but better meat is really strong that but we still need to have livestock in the system we need to have milk that's produced from grass we need to let the cows out we need to you know understand that that livestock is part of the system and my fear is is a lot of people are getting the headline and I'm feeling that meat is all bad and from our understanding in international research regenerative agriculture depends on there being an element of extensive livestock grazing so those messages are critically important for ecological recovery because about livestock we don't have life in the soil and we don't have an underpinning of our ecological recovery so regenerative agriculture is brilliant and could solve a lot of these things but we need our help our farmers to get there yeah thank you thanks Jenny um so we we're just I'm just going to run out for just by a few minutes because you've got so many great questions here just want to carry on for a few more questions and then wrap up I hope that's okay with everyone so Ian you were kind of wanting to answer about the path to dependencies that you see in agriculture forestry sectors how that might be overcome yes um well that's that's a big big question I think um the path dependencies are definitely there particularly um in agriculture and I think in the report we identified quite a lot of them and I think one way that happens is and it just links to what we're talking about um often there's a sort of an assumption that there's a quick fix there and that can be taken from one particular context and applied elsewhere and that often makes things worse I think so I think we had particular concerns around there being some sort of magic panacea that is going to quickly cure all our problems so particularly in the soils context we really need a long-term strategy and I think we need to be thinking about just in general more diversification trying out different options learning from that and I think the key thing and I think that ties in very well with what we've just been talking about is this needs to be a learning process we need to sort of learn to do things in a different way for a different world for different conditions so not just to base the decisions upon how we've done them in the past thanks Ian um I just wanted to switch on to a question that was asked by David Vincent and Pam I think you indicated that you quite like to answer this one so it was just asking whether you guys had had a chance to look at the impact of climate change on keystone habitats and species and their you know their their key roles in preserving ecosystem functions yes I don't know so I was going to answer that but I can um yeah within the chapter we did not explicitly address keystone species partly because there's a debate about you know which are the keystone species and also obviously we were very much just looking at what evidence is there for the impacts of climate change now and what are the projected impacts in the future as the basis for our assessment so again we would need to ensure that that information was there before we assessed keystone species I think keystone species perhaps become more important when you're thinking about delivery of ecosystem services and some ecosystem services so it would be an alternative approach or perhaps an additional sort of sub-risk but it's not one we explicitly looked at um in the chapter thanks Pam I guess we've got time for one last question and I guess it's I just wanted to pick up on one question that's been upvoted quite a lot here and it's just about how do we speed this up so we haven't got long so how do we speed this up so maybe what if we take everybody in turn that would be great so maybe start with with Pam thank you nice going first um I think for me the thing that sort of come out is the need for coordination and I think if we act together and I'm a particular sort of advocate of nature-based solutions um I'm not saying I'm going to provide all the answers but I think if we act together in unison we can speed things up thanks Pam um Ian I think the key thing is we just need to do something rather than just sort of like putting off the decision into the future a particular issue I mean I mentioned that particularly for costs um and I think we're referencing the partners or there's a recent um House of Lords report on similar issues which is effectively saying that we're just putting off these difficult decisions into the future um but we really need to do it now okay in some cases we might make mistakes but we need to learn from that because otherwise the risks as we just identify in the report are just going to increase and increase in cost as well every time we do that uh Brendan thank you Ian yeah I think um I kind of made a reference to it in my presentation that um we've got a really special time now to get the to get adaptation into the policies um that are needed and also legislation I think over the next two years with the overhaul of the of the EU previous policies in place so if we can act now and make sure that we make the most of this particular time which won't last forever I think that will be a key um driver behind getting things done thanks Brendan Ollie well all of those things of course um just somehow we need to get the urgency of the situation that we're in much better understood um that we're actually on a pathway of a trajectory change and we have to learn to live with and make the best of and understanding some of those tipping points and the opportunities of the future but really to make the best of all of our lives we have to now embrace change and live with that thanks Ollie and last but not least Jenny I think we need to act locally and act now and in a context that gives us you know the opportunity to um deliver against those wider you know feeling that we're part of a national and international um delivery opportunity I mean certainly from our perspective we feel working at a policy level with government and working at a county level in delivery um oh they're actually the the counties and the districts and the communities and the farmers are acting they just need support to act faster and to in a more coordinated way and everyone's trying to find their way through to do something meaningful but it's not structured and if we have that opportunity to give people simple straightforward advice that having coordinate support to the local level we would deliver these national um policies excuse me cut your words out those policies as well but at the moment the government's just throwing out I'm at the moment there's 19 different funding streams that are being put out and it's all about action on the ground but not about advice and coordination and that is the bit that is wasteful and it would be cost beneficial to get some structure around local action in that wider context so yeah let's just all go and do our own thing in the in our locality and get on with it thank you. Ollie do you want to come in? Just just one final thought I think it's really ironic that we put so much effort correctly on mitigation where actually our contribution globally is essential but it's actually really small and yet we have adaptation that's coming down at us like a freight train through the tunnel which actually really impacts our lives which we have completely the power to make to act upon it and yet so much of the focus is on mitigation and not on adaptation. Yeah I definitely wouldn't argue with that one having sat on the adaptation panel of the climate change committee so thanks very much everybody that was a really fantastic session and some really great questions from the audience and I'm sorry that we didn't manage to answer them all but some some really great questions and thanks to all the panelists and the authors that came on and Brendan from the CCC so just to end just to before we end just to say that there are five further webinars in this series the UK climate restates of the nation and there'll be a link in the the question answer chat box shortly or the chat box shortly for you to link to those and some really fantastic ones coming up so thanks very much everyone thanks for watching us and I hope that was informative and you got a really good flavour of what we've been doing in the technical report and advisory.