EHJ March 2004, pages 72-74
How prepared are you? Local authorities need to act now to draw up sensible responses to climate change. Nick Warburton reports

Imagine the scenario. The year is 2040 and August has been another scorcher of a month. Daytime temperatures have rarely dipped below 40°C and emergency services across the country have been struggling to cope with the effects of successive heatwaves, which so far have resulted in 800 fatalities.

As temperatures soar, hospitals have been battling to deal with daily admissions, mostly from people suffering from respiratory diseases or stroke. Environmental health departments, meanwhile, have been flooded with food poisoning complaints.

Few people would disagree that Britain's climate is changing and that this trend is likely to continue over the next century. Climate change scenarios published by the UK climate impacts programme (UKCIP) in April 2002 forecast that average temperatures across the UK could increase by 2 to 3.5ûC over the next 100 years, with potentially far-reaching impacts on local communities.

The Defra-commissioned and funded research, developed by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the Met Office, paints a future Britain with mild but wetter winters and warmer and possibly drier summers. The scenarios, based on four different emission levels, forecast that sea levels will rise, with waters possibly rising by as much as 86cm on current levels in the south-east by 2080.

Such dramatic shifts in temperature are expected to result in more frequent bouts of severe and extreme weather conditions, posing challenges for local communities and the local authorities responsible for protecting them. The increasing frequency of severe winter gales, combined with changes in sea levels, are likely to cause severe flooding in low-lying coastal areas. The autumn and winter floods of 2000, were proof, if any were needed, of how vulnerable communities are to the effects of such unpredictable weather patterns.

While it is difficult to predict exactly how it will affect communities in the future, climatic change will undoubtedly have a major impact on public health. In 2002, the Department of Health published a report, Health effects of climate change in the UK, on the possible effects of climate change on people's health. The report adopted the UKCIP's climate change scenarios for the 2020s, 2050s and 2080s and took into account the likely impact of variables such as increased temperatures and raised sea levels on health.

Not all of the results were negative. Nevertheless, the report did estimate, for instance, that by the 2050s, the number of heat-related deaths could increase to around 2,800 per year, up from 800, compared to the 1990s. Environmental health departments would be able to play a key role in this area by raising awareness of the issue and providing advice to people who work outdoors about dangers associated with skin cancer.

Warmer summers will also impact on the office environment as humidity levels within buildings increase, causing thermal discomfort. The environmental health profession could play a leading role in calling for changes to health and safety legislation, which would require companies to set both a maximum as well as a minimum temperature level within buildings.

Higher temperatures will undoubtedly impact on food safety. The study findings indicate that cases of food poisoning may rise by about 10,000 per year - 10 per cent higher than the number of cases notified in 1998. If this is the case, EHPs will need to be more proactive in raising awareness of food hygiene practices among businesses and the public.

Tim Deveaux, CIEH chairman and local agenda 21 officer at Gateshead MDC, says that other potential environmental health problems include infectious disease being spread through long-term flooding, subsidence in housing due to long dry spells of weather, the possible emergence of malaria, and a greater number of air pollution-related deaths in the summer.

He argues that more needs to be done to raise EHPs' awareness of how climate change could impact on environmental health services in the future as well as how EHPs can use their holistic approach to influence decisions across council services at local government level.

Action here remains the cornerstone of the government's policy on climate change and local authorities are increasingly being called on to act now to find practical responses to climatic change. As UKCIP's guidance document, Climate change and local communities - how prepared are you? explains, local authorities as community leaders have an important role to play in tackling such issues.

Set up by the government in 1997 and funded by Defra, UKCIP aims to help local authorities assess how they might be affected by climate change. Its guidance, published in July 2003, and its website offer a range of tools and data to assist with climate change risk assessments and developing adaptation strategies.

"Our role is to encourage people to think about how climate change may affect them in the future and what steps they can take now to anticipate the opportunities and problems it may present," says Kay Jenkinson, communications manager at UKCIP.

Adopting flexible strategies on climate change is the way forward for local authorities. Up till now, local authorities have tended to direct resources towards mitigation, with measures to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions, for example, by supporting low-carbon and renewable energy sources and promoting more sustainable transport but, even by taking this action, the impact of climate change will still be felt locally.

"The mitigation aspect is the 'no regrets' stuff," says Ian Bateman, climate change officer at Devon CC. "We have to do it. Anything that we can do to reduce CO2 we must accept as a 'no regrets' measure because it all helps. But we've been chucking this stuff into the atmosphere since 1750 [so] there's all this climate change stored up in the atmosphere, which is going to happen anyway. That's why you obviously have to do adaptation."

For Mr Bateman, that means identifying what the climate impacts are, who the vulnerable members of society are, what the most vulnerable locations and most vulnerable ecosystems are and concentrating on those areas. For those people in local authorities who are tasked with coordinating action on climate change and writing climate change action plans, this is a major challenge. "The bit that's missing in there, for me, is how climate change is going to affect the man in the street in Devon," says Mr Bateman.

"That is a question that I can't yet answer because the climate science hasn't got there. It doesn't allow me to look at individual towns. It's very much done at a regional level. That's about as low as it's got. What the climate scientists are doing is saying things like 'the mean annual temperature is going to rise by 0.3°C'. To the man in the street that means precisely nothing."

To overcome this problem, climate change has to be put in real terms and that means first raising awareness of the issue. "It's actually translating the climate change science into something which people can understand so they can buy into it," says Mr Bateman. "It's a hell of a message to sell and the reason that it is difficult to sell is because it's not going to happen a week on Friday. It's likely that not much will have changed, because of natural variability, by the mid2020s. So how do you sell that message?"

Selling the message within local authorities means getting people to understand that their area of responsibility, policy and service delivery might be affected. "Many people don't see their area impacted or contributing at the moment," he continues. "So it's trying to do that bit of education and say, 'I think the Highways Agency ought to be involved in this because they may have to put in bigger drains or, if not put in bigger drains, empty them more often'. You have to make that logical jump for them."

Candice Collier, climate change officer at Southampton Council, agrees that raising awareness across council services and within the community is a key first step. Appointed last September to write a climate change and air quality action plan, her work focuses largely on coastal defence, renewable energy and air quality. Much of her role at the moment, she says, entails looking at the potential scenarios and how she can influence decisions across the council.

Taking a cautious approach would appear to be the most sensible option. As Mr Bateman explains, quite often there is not enough information to know precisely what councils need to do. However, as local authorities must be seen to be doing things, there is also a danger of spending council taxpayers' money on the wrong moves if decisions are made quickly. One area that he believes money should be spent on is emergency planning.

"It's the climate extremes that are the indicators of climate change and we should be ready for those climate extremes," he says. "Most councils have an emergency planning role and my view is that that's the initial adaptation measure, so that we are ready for storms and hurricanes and floods and droughts and extremely hot weather."

Local authorities will also need to think about the strategic adaptations - the things that won't happen naturally which councils have responsibility for, such as building new towns. "If you're putting drainage in for a new town, you make sure that you understand what the climate might be like over the next 50 to 100 years and plan accordingly," says Mr Bateman.

The government has stated publicly that it sees climate change as a central part of sustainable development and is encouraging local authorities to integrate action on climate change into the ongoing development of community strategies and community plans.

It has also encouraged local authorities to sign the Nottingham declaration on climate change, a voluntary agreement which recognises that climate change is likely to be one of the key drivers of change within communities this century. The declaration commits local authorities to prepare a community action plan to tackle the causes and effects of climate change. So far, over 70 local authorities have become signatories.

While it's still early days, local authorities are waking up to the fact that climate change will have far-reaching effects on local communities and that strategies developed now could save them significant costs. "Maybe climate change is where sustainability was 20 years ago and it's slowly making its way up the agenda," says Ms Collier.

At last year's launch for the Climate change and communities - how prepared are you? document, parliamentary under secretary of state at the ODPM Phil Hope told delegates that councils were central to the government's efforts to tackle climate change. The issue may be global, he said, but the solution is local.