This story was told in a story circle at the Learning History workshop in February 2008.
Read how an assessment of Climate Change impacts has been carried out and how it is being used to inform decision makers at a local level.
Local Lessons – Melting roads and open windows!
A story told in the “Tales from the Carbon Face” story circle
I
will mention the most recent experience of innovation, I’m not sure it is
necessarily an innovation. I have
been involved in the country’s first LCLIP which is the Local Climate Impacts
Profile for District Council. This
is a process by which you investigate a media archive over a predetermined
period in the past. We chose a
six-year period. We went in arrangement
with the local media and looked at that six-year in full; we picked out all the
extreme weather events that occurred during that period. Having detailed that, we - well a
student who was working with me - set about interviewing key staff including
some strategic staff and also operational staff.
The
operational staff sometimes have more experience of what actually happened and
as a result of those interviews, we costed the impacts of that period of
time. To give you an example,
Oxford who did a similar LCLIP came up with £16 million over a ten-year
period—that was typically melting (ph) roads, social services, and obvious
things with some less obvious things like crime increasing because when people
would open any windows and et cetera et cetera.
The outcome of our LCLIP has been the identification of half a million pounds over that six-year period which is nowhere near significant (as Oxford), but then that is not terribly surprising because the districts do not have the same service provision you get at county council level—and I have been presenting the outcome to senior officers: to a range of councils, to local strategic partnership in an attempt to draw decision makers attention to the need for adaptation at the local level and why climate change is relevant to local leadership because it is much easier to take things that we have had in the past and bring them to attention when we are expecting to make decisions about the future which are uncertain.
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