Surrey County Council's Cabinet Member for Environment, Cllr Marisa Heath, has launched the Surrey Climate Adaptation Plan to ensure multi-agency partnership and collaboration to tackle climate issues and provide a resilient Surrey that is prepared for changing weather systems.
The new Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Strategy, known as "Surrey Adapt", arrives at a time when we are seeing the impact of changing weather patterns on our county. In Surrey, we faced our hottest summer on record in 2022, coupled with our most fierce wildfire season. In 2023 we have now faced the hottest June ever on record, followed by the wettest July.
It is important that everyone in Surrey is aware that we will face many climate-related impacts in the coming years even if our Net Zero ambitions, as set out in our highly ambitious Greener Futures programmes, are met. We must prepare for, and adapt to, increasing climate hazards, risks and impacts and Surrey Adapt provides a positive framework for Surrey to adapt to those impacts.
Surrey Adapt will guide us in moving away from focusing on climate extremes as one-off "events" that we must manage in reactive ways towards them being our "new normal" environment in which we must develop our infrastructure, services, ecosystems, communities and economies to co-exist. If we deliver this strategy well, in addition to meeting our Net Zero targets, we can create a future that is far more positive than ever anticipated, with nature recovery and systems that work for us all to maintain a stable climate.
By changing how we design infrastructure and homes, we can ensure that our hard-earned resources are not washed away in floods or degraded in heatwaves, but rather they are resilient and our residents safe from harm's way. By changing how our schools and amenities are designed, we can reduce the risk to disrupted learning and missed school days, and create safe spaces for children to learn in a changed environment. When our care homes and hospitals and other buildings are designed for both cold and heat extremes, our elderly and vulnerable residents do not need to be evacuated or overwhelm hospitals with related ailments in extreme events. It is by managing landscapes and ecosystems to provide services of flood attenuation, drought resilience, cooling, and biodiversity for pollinators and food security that we will create multiple co-benefits for residents. This strategy makes financial sense as well as environmental, health and wellbeing sense. Ultimately it will play its role in ensuring that "no-one is left behind."
We have a roadmap with this strategy to create a collaborative future for the residents of Surrey that is safer, well adapted and ready to seize upon the opportunities that emerge. The details of how we get there will be further developed in the coming period as we analyse our risks and unpack our various ways of responding. A wide range of different responses are required across Surrey organisations, working on individual actions and in partnership and we must all work together to create a resilient and prepared Surrey.
Commenting, Marisa said:
"So this week I launched the Surrey Climate Adaptation Plan. The reason are interested in this piece of work and I'm talking about it, is because it's about the reality of what we're facing from changing weather systems, regardless of whether you think climate change is man-made or caused by nature cycles, the reality is upon us, with more flooding and wildfires.
"In fact, we're looking at a 15% increase in the risk of flooding, and a 28% increase in the risk of more droughts. That's got a huge impact on our resources, on the safety of residents, on the survival of wildlife, and on the production of food.
"The Adaptation Plan is therefore crucial, and it's a really important piece of work to safeguard us going into the future. It links into emergency management plans, into replacement infrastructure, dealing with emergent diseases, retrofitting existing buildings, and we've got nine priority programmes.
"To reassure residents, Surrey has already been carrying out climate adaptation, we've got close to £30 million pound budget for flood prevention programmes, we raised £640 million for the River Thames Scheme, and the Fire and Rescue Service now have new equipment, training, and tactics to respond to the threat of wildfires. We've also just applied to the Environment Agency (EA) for some flood management work around the River Mole.
"Now the adaptation plan is a really complicated and challenging piece of work, I don't deny that, but what we're trying to do is bring together Borough and Districts, the EA, utility companies like Thames Water, the Fire and Rescue Service, and community groups to really deliver on what we've outlined in this plan."
Pictured, Lightwater Country Park
