Keir Starmer’s ‘plan for change’ won’t deliver the climate adaptation we need

The government definitely needed a reset. But it missed a crucial mission.

Adrian Ramsay is co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales and the MP for Waveney Valley

Call it a reset, call it a “plan for change”, the Prime Minister’s administration was in desperate need of a relaunch. Labour have had a shaky first few months, peppered with mis-steps from the ending of the winter fuel allowance to a budget which penalises small businesses and employers and won’t deliver improved living standards for people.

So now we have the Government’s new priorities from housing to NHS waiting lists to early years education. The ambition for Britain to be a clean energy superpower squeezes on to the list but, disappointingly, the ambition has been weakened to 95% clean power by 2030 – the same target set by the previous Conservative government.

What’s more disappointing is the silence on how we should be adapting to the impacts of climate breakdown which are affecting our communities now.

Even if we manage to limit global heating to 1.5C, and that looks more and more unlikely as emissions continue to grow and global efforts to decarbonise falter, significant changes to the climate and our weather systems are baked in. That means the UK faces more frequent severe flooding and more summer heatwaves.

We were all shocked this autumn by the images from Spain as the Valencia region was hit by devastating floods which destroyed homes, bridges, roads and cost hundreds of lives. The cost to the Spanish economy is huge. The Valencia region has asked for over 30 billion Euros in relief and the insurance costs are expected to run to several billion more. 

Are we so confident that similar catastrophic flooding couldn’t happen here in the UK? The storms which hit parts of England and Wales this autumn were nothing like as severe as those in Spain yet they still led to hundreds of homes in the Midlands and South being flooded, exposing the total inadequacy of our flood defences. More than half the population say they’re not equipped to deal with flooding and the damage it would cause to their home.

The need to adapt to a different, more unstable climate shouldn’t come as a surprise to Government. Its own advisers, the Climate Change Committee, issued a review of the National Adaptation Programme earlier this year and it was scathing.

The UK is falling far short of what’s needed. The adaptation plans lack the pace and ambition to address the climate risks which are happening now. Fewer than half of the short-term actions needed to address the most urgent risks are in progress. There is no vision and the current approach isn’t working.

So while I welcome the Government’s ambition to make the UK a clean energy super-power to reduce our carbon emissions, ministers aren’t addressing the need to adapt and build up resilience now. And in some respects, we’re moving backwards.

Take the ambition for more house building. We urgently need more homes, especially more affordable homes and homes built for social rent. But building on floodplains not only condemns future owners to the misery of likely flooding, it also stops the land absorbing and holding back floodwater as nature intended.

Allowing floodplains to do their job isn’t the only nature-based solution that is being overlooked. We need to un-do the damage of previous generations and re-plant hedgerows and trees, rewind rivers and create ponds to hold back floodwaters. Nature is our ally in adapting to a changed climate: we shouldn’t ignore it.

Flooding is not the only risk to people’s livelihoods and the economy. So is extreme heat. We have already seen temperatures of above 40C in the UK which scientists say have happened only because of climate change. Our infrastructure needs to be resilient to these extreme temperatures so railways don’t buckle and people don’t bake in their homes. Retrofitting homes isn’t only about insulation to keep people warm in winter. It’s also about methods to keep them cool in summer. Over half of homes are at risk of over-heating which gives a sense of the scale of the challenge. On this, the Government has nothing to say.

Nor should we ignore the impact extreme temperatures have on our food security. The Climate Change Committee warned five years ago that more frequent weather extremes would damage crops and livestock, making food prices more volatile. Biodiversity loss could have an even greater impact, leaving crops more vulnerable to pests and pathogens.

So yes, Prime Minister, your Government needed a reset. But you’ve missed a critical mission – a national adaptation plan to safeguard our food security, better prepare the country for a future of more extreme weather and put nature at the heart of our response to climate change.