Will Richardson examines how UK companies are preparing for climate impacts. He cites forecasts of 40°C summers within 35 years, coastal erosion of 2-4 meters annually in Yorkshire and Norfolk, and a 2022 incident where London Fire Brigade ran out of engines during heat-driven fires. The question: where does climate risk actually sit in your organization?
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Hey, thanks so much for listening. I would love to be able to help you more on what it is that you are listening to and why you're listening to me. If you could click on the link in the show notes, that would be awesome because it will help me define what it is that we should be talking about on this podcast. So, following on from our national emergency briefing, film, it seems a cross-party group of MPs led by Andrew George MP has tabled an early-day motion in Parliament calling for a UK-wide televised national emergency briefing on the climate and climate nature crisis, which is awesome. Now, I'm seeing a lot of chatter about El Niño and the effect that that's going to have this year. on our climate in the UK and around the world. And it comes as temperatures are set to reach 28 degrees centigrade on Friday, while— that's in the south— whilst in the next 35 years, a 40-degree centigrade summer heat is likely to become typical. Which the Climate Change Committee have started talking about the fact that we're going to be needing to use air conditioning way more. Schools may have to change when they do exams. Hospitals will have to potentially be redesigned. Baroness Brown of the Climate Change Committee said cooling measures must be rolled out at scale. In July 2022, the London Fire Brigade completely ran out of fire engines. I saw the other day on a friend of mine's feed on LinkedIn. So, and that was because there were far too many fires because of the heat that was going on in July that year. And so with all of this going on, temperature rises, a number of houses and residents in flood-prone areas will eventually have to abandon their homes in managed relocations as defences fail to keep up with rising rivers and seas. Parts of our coastlines in Yorkshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk are retreating by 2 metres to 4 meters per year. The cost of adapting this country to try and mitigate any disasters is way cheaper than doing nothing at all. What I want to ask you is, where does risk lie within your company and how are you going to react?
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