Original interview by David Ballard. An interview with Chris West, director of the UK Climate Impacts Programme, as he began his appointment in 2002. An exploration of the need and purpose of adaptation to climate change.

Introduction

Climate change may affect the types of trees we see around us.

"Yorkshire and Humberside will lose high altitude habitats"."... If you plant a beech tree in the south of England, you can anticipate that it is going to be short of water when it is a grown tree."

Just two of the startling realisations highlighted in this interview with the new chief executive of the UK Climate Impacts Programme. Dr Chris West describes his work to David Ballard to coincide with the launch of a new report on the Yorkshire and Humberside region. As the Kyoto process flounders, the mitigation response to climate change looks increasingly ineffective. UKCIP is pursuing an alternative and potentially complementary approach by focussing on adaptation to climate change. Dr. Chris West also gives his views on whether this is likely to be an effective way of responding to climate change.

Sections in this article

Why Dr. West took on the challenge

The role of the UK Climate Impacts Programme

What UKCIP offers users

The background to the Yorkshire and Humberside study

What is expected of stakeholders?

The process dimension

Communicating the scale of the challenge

How likely are the various scenarios?

Does the process tend to downplay impacts?

Moving to action

Can a lower carbon future be highly desirable?

Impacts beyond the UK

Climate change as a moral issue

Next steps for UKCIP

Where Next?

Why Dr. West took on the challenge

Chris West, Chief Executive UKCIP.

David Ballard: Thank you for talking to us, Dr West. Can I begin by asking what led you to move from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to take up the leadership of the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP).

Dr. Chris West: The research councils were instructed in a 1993 White Paper to take much more account of users. In parallel the European research programmes were very much focused on how the research was used. In helping to run that programme we started to focus much more on the whole chain from doing the research to making that research useful to somebody, whether a policymaker or someone who would make money from the output. The opportunity to work with UKCIP who are entirely driven by that end of the research chain, by the stakeholders, was very tempting indeed.

The role of the UK Climate Impacts Programme

David: What do you see as the unique contribution that UKCIP can make in helping society respond to climate change?

Chris West: The direct thing that we can do is to help people who want to know about the impacts of climate change to undertake a study and find out what those impacts might be. That is the overt purpose of UKCIP. What it does sneakily at the same time is to raise awareness. If you ask people to begin to adapt to something that's happening now, they start to think about the impact that they are having on the environment. So not just about reacting to climate change, but starting to think about the causation of climate change.

David: So you hope that this will lead to a more radical response than just adaptation?

Chris West: Yes. Adaptation is one response and people will undertake adaptation for many just selfish reasons.  In doing that, they have to start thinking about the impact that they are having on climate change.

What UKCIP offers users

David: How can you help someone set up a study?

Chris West: We can give them scenarios of what the future might look like. We can help them with the process of looking at how those scenarios might unfold, at what they might mean for their individual region or sector or whatever. We have a number of tools that they might use in addition to the climate scenarios and we can encourage them to look at all the possibilities. 

David: What are some of the other tools that you offer?

Chris West: Socio-economic scenarios. The most difficult thing in climate change is looking at the future of what people do. Go back half a century: nobody would have predicted what we have now. In the same way, it is very hard to predict what we will have in 50 years time. We might go down a pursue-capitalism course: everything is driven by money. We might finally grasp the nettle and steer towards sustainability. In practice we will probably steer somewhere between those two.

David: Do you mean the IPCC A1, A2, B1 and B2 scenarios and their permutations?

Chris West: Those scenarios are specifically about emissions of carbon dioxide, but they are driven by underlying socio-economic changes that might happen. They are not completely separate from the IPCC scenarios, but they are a bit separate.

David: You say that this process is open to anyone who is interested, but this would be a very large thing for an unemployed person living in Grimsby or in Immingham to undertake. In practice, who are your customers?

Chris West: In practice, they are regional planning bodies, trade associations, utilities, some of the bigger companies. If you like, the man in the street sees those big organisations sitting up and taking notice, that will have direct impacts on that man and he can also see that there's an example, that if these big organisations are taking notice, perhaps there is something to take notice of as well.

The background to the Yorkshire and Humberside study

David: The Yorkshire and Humberside study, published on 21st June, 2002, is the first to be published using the UKCIP 2002 scenarios. What is UKCIP's role in producing such a report?

Chris West: We helped it happen. The report was produced by consultants. We helped the people in the region who wanted to undertake this study to find the right people to do it, gave them all of our contacts, gave them access to our tools and helped them through our experience of similar studies in the past using the 1998 scenarios. We can help with the process of producing a report like this.

David: The study produced two reports, which I would say fall into the categories of ‘large' and ‘very large'. What do you hope will happen to those reports?

Chris West: I hope they will get read. The longer one is hard work, but the shorter one - I hope that people will be able to look through it and find a range of things they might not yet appreciate could be happening. I hope that some people will find things they can actually respond to in there. The report is also an outline of what will be done in the future.

What is expected of stakeholders?

David: This is known as a stakeholder process. The UK Government supports you in your work, so I guess that there is some public money involved. What is the minimum that you expect of the sponsoring organisations for you to be interested in supporting them? What do you see as their side of the bargain, apart from hiring consultants and producing a report?

Chris West: They have to be interested in using the report. The Government pays for us to provide a service, but those stakeholders have actually paid for this piece of work.

David: Would it be too crude to say that you have no quality criteria for the published report...?

Chris West: No, that would be wrong!

David: OK, so I am interested in what you are looking for in deciding, "this is a group of people that are interested and worth supporting".

Chris West: Oh at that stage it is enough that they say they are interested and that they are prepared to put some resources into it. We can help them undertake a study that will be useful to them and useful to everyone else in that it is part of a national process - eventually all of these will glue together. As long as someone wants to undertake the study, come one, come all, they could be anybody!

The process dimension

David: I am interested particularly in the process side of this. It is a word that you have used several times. What would you expect of stakeholders in terms of who they engage with? What sort of process should they use to engage with other stakeholders, how should they distribute findings and the like? What do you expect of them, or is it all up to them?

Chris West: It is up to them. We can help because we have been through it in other places. A company, a utility has customers, they have suppliers. Once we have undertaken the first scoping study, the intention is that people then realise that there is more that they need to know. The process does not stop with this report, it starts with this report! People start to take account of climate change in everything that they do. Clearly, if you a re building a brand new power station, you take a lot of notice of it. If you are thinking of buying a caravan, maybe it doesn't matter.

David: I am interested particularly in interactions with the general public, beyond the big organisations. Climate change is an issue that many people think is hard because so many people contribute to it. What do you think is good practice in a study like this?

Chris West: I think that those organisations start to tell people why they are doing what they are. ‘We are rebuilding this whatever-it-is because we fear or anticipate that in so many years time it may flood, so we are changing what we are doing'. ‘We anticipate that the weather is going to get warmer so we are building houses that are more suitable for warm weather' - whatever business they are in. Not just to do it, but to say, ‘this is why we are doing it'.

Communicating the scale of the challenge

David: Various people have said that climate change is the most serious single environmental challenge that there is, how large a responsibility does UKCIP have in getting this across to people?

Chris West: We have a part of that responsibility. We have a remit that is very definitely focused on the adaptation side of the response. We have neither the remit nor the resources to mount a nationwide education programme. But because we are involved in the process of looking at adaptation, that has the trickle on effect that I described earlier, we are not the people to educate everybody about climate change and how serious it is. If people begin to take it seriously, then we can help them take it very seriously indeed.

David: So you can go in at different levels of response, depending on the questions that people are asking?

Chris West: Yes. Because we are Government resourced to provide a service, and because there are only seven of us, at the moment it is only big groupings that are going to engage with us. If there were 40,000 of us, yes, we would happily go to every school in the country and tell the school kids what we are up to - but it's not feasible.

David: Well maybe changingclimate.org can help!

How likely are the various scenarios?

David: I'd like to ask you about the probabilities of the various scenarios happening. Now I understand that scenarios are not predictions, that no one would expect you to say: this one is likely to happen and this one not. However, there is a statement in the report that the region of Humberside and Yorkshire, and the UK as a whole, are aiming for reductions of emissions of more than 20% off the 1990 levels. The report says (and I am giving you a quotation here) ‘despite these efforts, we are already committed to further climate change due to lags in the climate system'. In my understanding, this is an understatement of the seriousness of the situation. Were we to turn off all climate emissions tomorrow we would still see a rise for 30 years approximately. Do you agree? If so, are you concerned about a statement which is perhaps underplaying the seriousness appearing in a report?

Chris West: I don't think that it is underplaying the seriousness. I think that it recognises that most people do not believe that this is a serious problem. People say, "Oh, in the future we can cut emissions: that will sort it out". I think that the point of that paragraph is to say "No!" Even if theoretically you could cut emissions to zero tomorrow, because of the CO2 already in the atmosphere and what we know about how long it stays there, there are climate changes built in. So it's not a question of either we adapt or we mitigate and try and stop climate change - we have to do both. Now the problem with the mitigation side, of doing something about human impact on the climate system, is whatever you do now doesn't have any effect for decades. People find it terribly difficult to take an action if they see no result. Now the trick is that the impacts of climate change are already happening. If people can say "alright, because of the impacts side, we recognise that climate change is happening, we are becoming more aware of climate change because we're having to adapt now", maybe that will make people prepared to change the impact that they are having on the climate.

Does the process tend to downplay impacts?

David: I would like to look at whether the report serves to downplay impacts. At the end of the report there is a table which, to a non-scientist, looks a bit concerning. You can see a lot of negatives, primarily to do with flooding. The example of Immingham is used in the main UKCIP02 report as an example of higher risks. If you look at the maps you see substantial areas, right up to Doncaster, where the floods could happen. To me, looking at the table, there look like more negatives than positives. And yet the conclusions both at the beginning and the end of the report, actually are longer for the opportunities side than for the problems. Just by reading the report you might think: "Gosh, more opportunities here, tremendous!" Why is that balance? Have you been nobbled?

Chris West: (laughs) A couple of things. Certainly there is a focus on flooding. Flooding is terribly obvious. People can imagine it, you can describe it, you can measure it. The maps you describe are areas that are at risk if there is no improvement to defence systems. Having said that, the reason that there is so much text on the opportunities is that they are very much harder to grab hold of. I think that there has been a deliberate effort to bring out those opportunities. If it were entirely negative, people would say, "Oh, it's all doom and gloom, I can't cope with it". By including some of the opportunities, the things we know far less about, it gives people something positive they can do, they are not just defending their way of life, there is actually a chance to do something new. Something different.

David: So it's a bit like a regional SWOT analysis?

Chris West: Yes. It would be wrong to leave out the opportunities.

David: OK, I can buy that. But when we look at biodiversity, we see a potential increase shown as an opportunity. But the work of the MONARCH study suggested that species migration could be very hard. A potential increase in biodiversity may well be true, but there are many impediments in the way we manage the land to those benefits being realised. What do you see as your responsibility when something like that comes up as a potential benefit?

Chris West: Well I think it balances the obvious loss of some species and some habitats. Yorkshire and Humberside will lose high altitude habitats.

David: The North Yorks Moors.

Chris West: Yes. A lot of species will be lost from those. But there will be other habitats that species can move into. There will be, I guess, a lot more salt marshes because part of the defence against flooding is to use salt marshes as a natural barrier. They are rich in biodiversity. Because Yorkshire and Humberside is not on the very South Coast of the UK, there will be a whole body of southern English species that will try to migrate northwards. Now some of them won't be able to because they are not mobile enough. Some of them certainly will. I would anticipate, for instance, that some of the southern English birds would be found increasingly commonly in the North of England.

Moving to action

David: So the aim is to take people over towards the responses?

Chris West: In a way it is unhelpful just to describe the impacts. What is really helpful is to say: "Here are the impacts and here is what you can do about them".

David: Well we can agree about that! It is very much a principle of changingclimate.org that it is important to put the science, the impacts, the initiatives in the context of what people can do as well. To summarise, I have been expressing a concern that a report like this might serve to minimise the risks of climate change. You have been saying that it is important to give the positive things that people can do so as not to demoralise them.

Chris West: It is not just that. The process is very conservative. We only say what we are sure of and if we are not sure, we say that we are not sure. If we just wanted to panic people, we could take the highest emissions scenario and look a hundred years into the future and go around saying ‘Woe, woe, everything is going to be awful. And yes, a century hence, if we did nothing sensible about it, things would be very bad indeed. All we can do at the moment is to look a few decades ahead, for which any remedial action is not going to be effective, and say that's what you have got to cope with. After that we do start to have a choice. We do nothing and it's worse or we start to do something sensible now and it's not so bad.

Can a lower carbon future be highly desirable?

David: Can you imagine a low carbon future that is highly desirable, that is better than our current society?

Chris West: Oh yes! Very much so! We can produce things like zero carbon cars, zero carbon houses, totally renewable energy resources. It's technologically quite difficult. It's hard to see it happening in so many decades, but yes, where people have tried it, it works very well. If you have a public transport system that works, why would you want a car? You would have a car and you would only play with it occasionally because you have another system sorted out. You can cycle to work or there's a decent bus or whatever it is. Instead of having a house that you need to spend money heating, you have a house that actually heats itself and makes a little bit of electricity to go into the grid.

David: This sounds as though this is quite heartfelt for you: it is possible to build a better future>

Chris West: Oh yes! There must be better ways of running the world than burning carbon!

David: It would be nice to think so, wouldn't it!

Impacts beyond the UK

David: This process is inevitably UK centred: that is your remit. But the major, the really crippling impacts are likely to be elsewhere. Is there any scope for a process such as this to engage a wider reflection in society about the impacts of climate change?

Chris West: I think by example. I think the UK is actually in the lead here in addressing not only the mitigation response but also the adaptation response. Having it stakeholder-led makes it almost bulletproof.  Nobody is imposing it. We could be funded to provide services that nobody wanted. People actually do want it. People are coming to us and saying, "we want to do a study, we want to do this or that". It is clearly needed. I would anticipate that in the future other countries would look at the UK and say, "that's a system we could use". Why not pass on our experience? It is not in our remit at the moment because clearly it's expensive to go around and tell people how well we are doing, but if people find out, that's great!

David: In his interview on changingclimate.org, Dr Pachauri (Chair of the IPCC) mentioned a colleague who asked: "how much would it cost to ship all the people off the Maldives". That shocked Dr Pachauri. Do you think that this process has the capacity to awaken more compassion in the human spirit than shown by Dr. Pachauri's colleague?

Chris West: I would hope so! If you write off the population of the Maldives like that, why not write off half the population of South Asia? Ten years or so ago I met a man who is in charge of drainage for the whole Maldives archipelago. He has to build drainage that goes uphill because he is already that close to sea level. It doesn't all drain by gravity but they have to pump it uphill to get it to go downhill again. Why yes, we could write off the Maldives, some Pacific nations, but it is scarcely the way to run a world.

Climate change as a moral issue

David: A very eminent climate scientist recently implied at a seminar here in Oxford that climate change is increasingly a moral issue and that the scientific case has been more or less demonstrated. Do you agree? If you do, what do you see as the role of UKCIP in this?

Chris West: To take that bit by bit, most reasonable people would recognise that if climate change and its human causes are not proven, there is incredibly strong evidence for it and rather suspect evidence against it. So yes, it is no longer a question of trying to gain acceptance for the theory. With exceptions, I think that most people can accept the theory and actually get on with doing something. As you say, it is a moral issue, not really for rich Western people versus poor people who happen to live on a low-lying island, but a moral issue for people who are alive now versus people who are not yet alive. Our children and grandchildren are going to have a worse job if we do nothing now.

David: And placing UKCIP's work in the context of that...?

Chris West: With the scenarios we are regularly talking about the 2020s, the 2050s, the 2080s. Now you and I will be dead by the 2080s and probably by the 2050s. We are now talking about things going on for longer than our lifetimes and that is actually quite rare. Governments think weeks ahead, years ahead if you are lucky. Businesses a year or so. There are very few people who do think decades and centuries ahead. UKCIP starts to open up that prospect for a whole different lot of people. It is interesting that some of the stakeholders who got engaged very early have got that long-term perspective. The National Trust and their gardens, some of which are hundreds of years old, if you plant a tree now it is not going to be mature for 200 years. So if you plant a beech tree in the south of England, you can anticipate that it is going to be short of water when it is a grown tree....

David: Really...

Chris West: ... People who are interested in gardens, forestry, even the Golf Club at St. Andrews, people interested in historic buildings that might well suffer from climate change, they have that long-term perspective. Getting that perspective into everyday use would be a major achievement.

David: That is very interesting. Thank you.

Next steps for UKCIP

David: So after a few weeks in the job, where next for UKCIP?

Chris West: We want to move beyond just describing the problem to the prescription, to helping people to come up with an adaptation strategy, something that they can actually do. So that is one theme. The other thing is practical terms. Because there are only seven of us and this is an increasing subject area with more and more people getting interested all the time, we want to set up a system of agents who can help us tell people about climate change and what is possible. Otherwise we could spend all of our times just racing around the country telling different groups of people, "climate change, you need to do something now". So that is something that we want to set up across the country.

David: What sort of person might be interested in becoming a UKCIP02 agent?

Chris West: I think that they will probably come from our existing stakeholders, organisations like Business in the Community, the utilities, the Environment Agency, organisations that have the countrywide spread and that are very focused on climate change in their own sector or region and are perfectly placed to tell other sectors or regions how far they have got. In all of this it is very much building on the first level - no experience but lots of enthusiasm - the next level, still enthusiasm but a bit more experience - and so you build up as time goes on, everybody gets better at it because we can share the experience. Because there is not a blueprint that everyone follows, different sectors and regions have all had slightly different approaches. At our User Forum they meet and exchange best practice and improve what they are all doing.

Where Next?

On ClimateX.org

Read about potential and current impacts of climate change in various articles in this section: for example ‘Health Ups and Downs of Climate Change', ‘The climate challenge for conservation' and ‘Larsen Ice Shelf B'. Also search the site using ‘impacts' as keyword.

External links

Take a look at the UKCIP site which is regularly updated with the latest research into climate change impacts and adaptation in the UK.