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Issues around water have never been far from the headlines this year, with the flood-related deaths in Valencia just the most tragic (thousands of deaths from climate-related events in poorer countries go less reported).

Closer to home, some English counties (including Staffordshire) suffered three times their average rainfall in September, according to the Met Office. Flooding in the south of the Moorlands made the local news; across the country the changing weather patterns have slashed farm yields, eroded soils and flooded fields.

With the second worst harvest on record, around £1bn of food production was lost.

Weather is complex, of course, and there are some special factors at play (the world is still in the wetter part of the El Nino/La Nina cycle). But there are some simple underlying figures. For every one degree rise in temperature, the atmosphere can hold 7% more moisture.

According to the internationally respected World Weather Attribution group, the exceptional UK rainfall from October 2023 to March 2024 was made four times more likely by climate change (and 20% heavier).

Ultimately, the only way to prevent these weather patterns becoming even more severe is to stop the pace of global warming – climate mitigation – but as these events show, climate change is already here.

That’s why adaption – making people and places more resilient to the effects of climate change are – has steadily crept up the agenda.

The UK's National Adaptation Strategy focuses on increasing the resilience of infrastructure to increasing temperature extremes, investment in the natural environment and shifts in crops and agriculture, changes that will need to be made to the built environment to protect public health and cope with shifts in business practices.

Wider cross-cutting risks include impacts and adaptations required for supply chains, trade and finance.

Unsurprisingly, the March 2024 report by the Climate Change Commission found the last government’s strategy fell far short of what was required.

“The evidence of the damage from climate change has never been clearer, but the UK’s current approach to adaptation is not working,” said Baroness Brown, Chair of the Adaptation Committee.

With services threatened by extreme weather, local authorities should be at the frontline of adaptation, but it is no secret that in the past officers have struggled to get members to take this as seriously as mitigation. It was only in September 2023 that Staffordshire County Council adopted an Adaptation Strategy. This was informed by a ground-breaking piece of work by Sustainability West Midlands. They have gone on to produce an adaption template for the NHS and small and medium-sized businesses in the area.

While council action on adaption is primarily at the county level (the County is the lead local Flood Authority), districts and boroughs are affected too.

The Staffordshire Moorlands Climate Action Plan includes references to the need to adapt to climate change that is already happening but it is fair to say that until now far less emphasis has been placed on this than on the push to reduce emissions.

Adaption will be a key focus next year in the reshaping of Part 2 of the Climate Action Plan, and building in resilience to climate change will for the first time be an important element of the review of the Local Plan (which shapes housing and other development in the district for the next five years).

Severn Trent Water have already agreed to come to the Moorlands to discuss their investment plans, which are likely to include more investment in areas such as the Tean Valley, as well as a major project to transfer raw water from Carsington reservoir to Tittesworth, in part to compensate for the Environment Agency’s removal of water-table damaging abstraction licenses in the Moorlands.

But the focus on water management is increasingly turning away from reliance on high-spec engineering solutions to ones that go with Nature’s flow, as it were. Severn Trent are pioneering a sustainable drainage scheme in Mansfield, which may have lessons for the future here.