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

Chapter 5
CONCLUSION
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We welcome the fact that governments and other agencies have begun the process of addressing
adaptation seriously over the last two years: since we began our study legislation has been put in
place and adaptation strategies and programmes have been established. This is a good start. But
much more needs be done if adaptation is to be embedded throughout all institutions, and our
recommendations will help that process.
Not all adaptation efforts will deliver the expected outcome in full – institutions will get it wrong
sometimes. But this does not mean those efforts be without value. A key aspect of building
adaptive capacity is learning what does and does not work, and feeding this back into the process
of framing and implementing the next steps in what will be a continuous journey without a
defined end-point.
We fully accept that our message is a difficult one. Adaptation is complicated, and it is likely to be
messy: much of what will happen cannot be predicted, or at least not with great certainty. 15 This
report does not offer specific solutions to the problems that each institution will face, as these will
be unique to the circumstance of each. By setting out the issues that institutions could usefully
address in order to understand what climate adaptation means for them and how to build their
capacity accordingly, we hope that it will be possible to build institutional capacity across the
board to be better equipped to deal with the changing climate.
Finally, we offer, in Box 5A, a list of ten questions which organisations – in both the public and
private sectors – might use to start their consideration of the need for adaptation. We hope that
these questions will stimulate those who have not yet begun to face that challenge of adapting to
climate change to do so.
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