Twenty-eighth Report Adapting Institutions to Climate Change Cm ...

Chapter 4
4.96
4.97
4.98
4.99
Both common law and human rights law are developing areas. We have not yet seen litigation
over planned land abandonment, and presumably the complete loss of property or home will
at least bring with it a greater burden of justification in human rights law. Loss of life would
also potentially raise different issues.
A number of specific statutory liabilities apply to damage resulting from flood defence work, 59
although they are unlikely to apply to a decision not to carry out flood defence work, which
will fall to the common law (for example, s 177 and Schedule 21 of the Water Resources
Act 1991).
Legal liabilities aside, insurance is another social mechanism for spreading risks and sharing costs,
and it can mitigate the disruption of flooding. It is when loss becomes uninsurable (as is already
happening in some parts of the UK both for flooding and coastal erosion) that claims for the
sharing of burdens are most energetically made of the state.
The agreement between Government and the insurance industry in respect of the availability of
insurance for residential property on flood plains is an important institutional intervention in
the distribution of burdens, albeit contingent on public funding of flood defence work within a
specific period. 60 The amount of loss that is uninsurable through ordinary market processes may
increase with climate change.
Current policies to enhance awareness and uptake of insurance by members of groups likely to
be underinsured or uninsured is another, albeit partial, response to the uneven distribution of
climate impacts. The Government’s Financial Inclusion: An action plan for 2008-11 61 was backed by
a £130 million Financial Inclusion Fund. It welcomed the new focus on uptake of insurance and
recommended that Government and the insurance industry work together to deliver a public
education programme setting out the benefits of insurance in the context of flooding.
More generally, we welcome Government recognition of the need to “support communities in
[the] process of adapting to both the physical effects of coastal change and the social and economic
impacts”, 62 and the beginnings of the development of a policy on this issue, including through
the coastal change pathfinders programme (3.94). 63 It remains to be seen whether the scale of the
challenge is really being recognised across the board.
LEARNING
4.100 Learning is the third of the essential components required to build adaptive capacity. The four
big challenges of uncertainty, complexity, path dependency, and equity and efficiency mean that
without continual and effective learning, institutions will quickly find the challenges unmanageable.
Without uncertainty, for example, there would be little need for learning because institutions
would simply be able to draw up a set of guidelines to be followed, with few revisions. We discuss
the concept of a ‘learning organisation’ further at 4.113.
4.101 There are two relevant types of learning here that derive from long-developed theories of transformational
and social learning: 64,65
instrumental
learning or cognitive enhancement through the acquisition of new skills or
information and knowledge; and
90