Building climate change resilience for the Square Mile

City of London climate adaptation and resilience adaptive pathways

London, UK

This innovative study focused on identifying the main climate-related risks for the City of London Corporation’s assets, both within the “Square Mile” of the City itself, and across the Corporation’s land portfolio, which includes Hampstead Heath and Epping Forest.

Experts from Buro Happold’s Sustainability and Cities Consulting teams were appointed to lead the development of the evidence base for all parts of the Climate Action Strategy related to climate adaptation and resilience. Through this work, Buro Happold was commissioned to conduct a climate risk and vulnerability assessment and build an adaptive pathways strategic plan tailored to the City Corporation’s needs.

Though increasingly applied in the water management sector, there is limited evidence of adaptive pathways being adopted across the full breadth of climate risks, as was required by the City Corporation. As such, it is believed this is one of the first studies of its kind in the UK. The approach aims to identify sequential actions that could be taken over time in response to key climate thresholds and trigger points as conditions evolve.

The adaptive pathways approach identifies sequential actions that could be taken over time in response to key climate thresholds and trigger points as conditions evolve.

The study recommends 39 programmes of action cutting across built assets and infrastructure, natural capital, emergency planning, supporting communities and businesses.

The City of London Corporation’s Climate Action Strategy includes bold commitments to net zero carbon, supporting sustainable growth and building climate resilience.

The Corporation is investing £68m over six years to support the goals of the Climate Action Strategy, of which £15m is dedicated to preparing the Square Mile for climate impacts.

Challenge

The goal of the study was to identify the main climate-related risks for the Corporation’s assets and the Square Mile in line with the latest UK Climate Change Risk Assessment. It would need to highlight the potential impacts if no actions were taken and the environmental thresholds at which these impacts will affect the businesses, residents and visitors to the City.

The City Corporation recognises the inherent uncertainties in estimating future climate change scenarios and in turn, how to plan for this. Using an adaptive pathways approach would support the City Corporation to not only remain resilient and build adaptive capacity over time but avoid maladaptation and strategically manage public budgets in the face of high uncertainty.

Building resilience and adaptive capacity to the impacts of climate change was recognised as a cross-departmental, multi-agency challenge that requires coordinated and collaborative action. The implementation of the pathways study would require joined up action across departments in the City Corporation as well as on behalf of citizens and businesses in the Square Mile.

The Corporation would need adaption actions to be proposed and a high-level implementation plan to be set out. The study had to pave the way for engaging stakeholders and citizens across the Square Mile as well as for a skills transfer to the Corporation’s officers, to enable them to implement the recommendations.

Solution

An adaptive pathways methodology is an innovative approach to climate planning. It establishes a series of sequential actions that may be taken over time based on defined thresholds and trigger points. As such, it focuses on the process of decision-making but facilitates short-term action and establishes a guiding framework to ensure the City Corporation remains responsive and resilient over the longer term. This focus on decision-making means choices along pathways can be altered in response to uncertainty in future emissions pathways and policy developments.

To achieve the project aims, our team carried out a quantitative assessment of the UK Climate Projections (2018) for the Square Mile, with additional research to understand the relevance of the key risks identified in the UK Climate Risk Assessment (2017) to the area. This understanding was then supplemented with an extensive literature review on city resilience strategies and the policy landscape, and a major expert stakeholder workshop to highlight further risks, considerations and opportunities.

This information was then synthesised to analyse resilience actions with a bespoke multi-criteria assessment tool, and subsequently to design and assess adaptive pathways. The final pathways present actions that the team identified as being crucial for the City Corporation to implement in the short term, investing in resilience and providing the basis for future actions. These are supplemented with rolling measures that the Corporation can use to evolve and adapt to the situation, and a series of adaptive actions and thresholds that can be monitored and implemented subject to the situation in future years.

Measures covered a wide variety of structural interventions, management methods, capital investment and core research areas. The study identified six different climate-related trigger points, based around flooding, overheating, shortages in the public water supply, risks to natural capital, risks to food production/trade and the emergence of new pests and diseases.

A pathway was mapped for each of these risk areas, alongside an analysis of the interventions that could be taken to tackle and build resilience to each of these risks. By linking and merging these pathways together, our experts built a sophisticated portfolio of 39 programmes for building adaptive capacity across the Square Mile and City Corporation’s portfolio.

Value

Our experts combined the deep technical knowledge of Buro Happold’s engineering specialisms with the integrated problem-solving expertise of our sustainability and city consulting teams. Our experience of delivering successful stakeholder engagement programmes was seen as a key benefit for the City Corporation. As part of the vulnerability assessment, we conducted broad consultation with the public and private sector, to further understand the risk perceptions and priorities of stakeholders.

Unlocking finance for adaptation and resilience is an often-cited barrier to greater action. The implementation plan delivered as part of this study outlined how the City Corporation might consider structuring and managing finance to support the implementation of these programmes.

For the City Corporation, the outcomes of the study provided a useful tool for clarifying the urgency for action within what is typically perceived as a long-term problem and consequently is often viewed as a lesser priority in the UK.