ECI Annual Review 2006/2007 - Environmental Change Institute ...

10
The UK Climate Impacts Programme
(UKCIP) was established by the
Government in 1997 and has been
hosted since then at the ECI. The
current contract (2005 – 2010) is
worth £4m, and defines UKCIP’s
aims as:
• to improve knowledge and
understanding of the impacts
of climate change among
stakeholders; and
• to help stakeholders to be
better equipped to undertake
adaptation to climate change.
UKCIP has not undertaken research
in the conventional sense, but
supports its stakeholders to
commission and manage research
into climate change impacts and
adaptation. At the start, our activity
focussed on delivering climate
change impacts research outputs,
but has since evolved into a way of
partnership working to make best
use of research results. Twelve subnational
“regional” impact scoping
studies have been completed along
with a number of sectoral studies.
However, we believe the consequent
formation of twelve active regional
adaptation partnerships and a small
number of sectoral partnerships is a
more significant outcome.
UK Climate
Impacts
Programme
UKCIP now sees itself as an
interface organisation, working in
the communication space between
science, society and policy. UKCIP
is founded on the premise that
whatever actions society takes
to address the causes of climate
change, some change is now
inevitable and society needs to
adapt to those changes. Our role in
this adaptation process is both as
agents of change and as students
of that change. We express this
complexity in the phrase “learning
through doing” which we see as a
means of addressing both of our
aims.
A unique feature of UKCIP is that we
are led by our stakeholders, a group
we define as professional decisionmakers
in the UK, from the public,
private and voluntary sectors.
Our dialogue with stakeholders is
now framed in terms of risk and
uncertainty: the presentation of
adaptation to climate change as
management of climate risk allows
decision-makers to hear familiar
words, and makes climate change
a more immediate issue. We make
the various sorts of uncertainty
explicit and present it as another
variable to be managed. In the
UKCIP typology of adaptation, we
contribute to “building adaptive
capacity” in our stakeholders, while
only our stakeholders, with their
own motivation and attitude to risk,
can begin “delivering adaptation
actions”.
Among the key resources that
UKCIP offer are a core set of
tools for stakeholders, including
scenarios of climate change in the
UK; socio-economic scenarios;
guidance on specific topics; a
framework for managing risk and
uncertainty; and a methodology for
costing impacts and adaptations.
Currently, we are working on the
next set of climate information
(UKCIP08) which will be based on
probabilistic predictions of climate;
will incorporate a well-described
downscaling tool; and will be
presented via a user-customisable
web interface. This tool will be
launched in 2008. Our role will be
to oversee the integration of these
components and the provision of
guidance and training on the use of
the tool.
This last aspect is seen as
increasingly important so UKCIP
now has a training specialist on the
staff who will be running workshops
on the proper use of existing tools,
as well as devising a learning
plan for users of the new set of
climate information, and a means
of empowering our stakeholders to
act for us in raising awareness of
climate change, of impacts, and of
the need to adapt.
Further tools are also under
development: the prototype
Adaptation Wizard is being revised;
guidance on adaptation options
is in draft form, and an illustrative
database of adaptation actions is
being prepared, so stakeholders
can see what others have done.
Two constituencies for whom we
have made special provision are
the business community and local
authorities. For businesses, we
developed a tool (Business Areas
CLimate Impacts Assessment Tool
– BACLIAT) to allow exploration of