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

Chapter 4
The tendency to ‘short-termism’ in decision making
4.64 Politicians, with an understandable eye on election cycles, are often focused on short-term
decisions and outcomes, and in the financial world investors prefer business decisions that yield
quick returns. Such ‘short-termism’ may not be in the best interests of adapting to climate change.
The above example (4.61) of a failed attempt at flood risk management by planting trees is a
good example of a short-term decision preventing an adaptive response, with potentially serious
long-term consequences.
4.65
The time frame for decisions relating to adaptation depends on the nature of the action that is
required. Long time frames involve infrastructures with a lifetime of decades (or even centuries in
the case of housing), whereas in other cases a short-term approach is suitable, for instance when
farmers decide what crops to plant next year, or if an institution launches an exercise focusing
on learning and developing capacity. The challenge is recognising the appropriate time frame for
the response. The water companies, for example, are encouraged to consider the longer term by
preparing a 25-year strategy to support their spending plans for each (shorter-term) five-year price
review, and they provide a model of how to deal flexibly with conflicting time frames and the
possibility of changing priorities.
The existence of different values and interests
4.66 Nature conservation illustrates very clearly how different values and interests may have profound
consequences for the way in which responses to climate change are framed. We have seen that
maintaining the status quo in species composition, distribution, and abundance of UK wildlife in
the face of climate change will be impossible (2.103). Virtually all the evidence we received from
the statutory and voluntary conservation bodies accepts that change is inevitable. The problem
is, who will decide what future protected areas will be like? How should society decide? Indeed,
should society decide, or should nature be left to get on with it? Should species currently regarded
as undesirable aliens be vigorously exterminated? And so on.
4.67
4.68
4.69
Not everybody in our society would accept that nature conservation ‘is a good thing’, and some
would regard people, jobs and economic growth (for instance) as much more important than
wildlife conservation. These individuals might frame their responses to climate change in a very
different way from a member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). But even
within the conservation movement itself, framing the debate is far from straightforward and again
involves different values and interests.
Many reasons for conserving biodiversity are not based on science, just as the reasons for
conserving mediaeval cathedrals, Mozart concertos and Monet paintings have nothing to do
with science. Many individuals within society value such things because they enrich our lives, or
because they feel an ethical and moral responsibility to care for the world around them, or because
they take spiritual comfort from wild places. Others, of course, beg to differ. Science can inform
and underpin conservation strategies but it cannot tell society what or why to conserve particular
species, habitats or ecosystems.
There are also profoundly important practical and economic reasons for nature conservation in
the form of the ‘services’ which ecosystems provide for society: species that can be harvested for
food or fibre, pollinators, healthy soils, wetlands that clean water and help control flooding in
urban areas, nature tourism, and so on. The science underpinning the evaluation of ecosystem
services is growing rapidly. 34 The Commission has been encouraged that Defra is pioneering
methodologies that enable ecosystems services to be valued.
82