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

overarching strategic framework set by (for instance) planning laws or European directives. Flood
risk management, for example, needs to have an overall strategy, often at the catchment level, but
is best delivered by considering what is required at a very local level. While it is easy to stress the
need for local and national responses to be complementary, this is not to downplay the frequent
and significant tensions between requirements and responses at these different scales. We revisit
some of these issues when we consider co-ordination later (4.86-4.89).
Competition with other goals
4.59 One of the key elements in framing adaptation is recognising the competition with other goals,
for example, economic recovery in a time of recession or the provision of housing in areas at
risk of flooding. Finding a balance can be challenging. For example, many water companies face
changes in the future availability of water and there may eventually be a conflict between the duty
to provide water and the need to preserve it. Again, the TE2100 project is an example of where
reducing the risk from storm surges has been balanced with development, housing provision,
managing habitats and local aspirations through a major programme of stakeholder engagement
and consultation, leading to a proposal that should enable the Thames estuary region to develop
and adapt to climate change for the next 90 years (Box 3E).
4.60
4.61
4.62
4.63
The nature of adaptation can also vary according to differing attitudes to risk, as organisations
weigh up competing goals, as well as to disposition (for example, a willingness to contemplate
change versus a desire for stability) and attitudes (optimistic versus pessimistic). 30 An interesting
small study revealed that even amongst a set of construction companies in one English region,
radically different adaptation strategies were adopted by different firms in the face of the same
apparent risk (increased flooding), ranging from withdrawal from the area to investment in
engineering solutions. 31
Competition with other goals can sometimes hamper adaptation. The Commission received
evidence of projects such as the proposal to create flood plain woodland in the Laver catchment
to help manage flood risk in Ripon. Although this was agreed in principle by all parties, the
project did not proceed because, in the end, the financial incentives proved insufficient given the
greater financial returns to individual landowners from alternative forms of land use that did not
involve planting trees. 32
An enormous range of social and economic objectives are pursued through the land use planning
system, and adaptation may compete for attention with these other objectives (3.29-3.44). We
argue in Chapter 5 that adaptation should not necessarily be seen as being in competition with,
for example, housing provision or economic development: we should think not about housing or
adaptation, but about housing that will best cope with a changing climate (5.58). In the long term,
and in the collective interest, this compatibility is reasonably straightforward. But in the short
term, poorly adapted flood-prone housing, for example, may seem to be necessary to satisfy an
immediate demand for more homes.
From the evidence it was clear that adaptation often takes place as part of addressing another
priority; as such it may be difficult to attribute the allocation of resource as being for adaptation,
with the result that it is hard to tell whether or not adaptation is a priority for an institution. 33
Whilst it could be argued that this does not matter so long as the desired outcome is being
achieved, organisations need to understand just how much of their resources are actually being
focused on adaptation, to avoid false or misleading discussions about expenditure on adaptation
versus expenditure in pursuit of other goals.
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Chapter 4