Climate change will increasingly pose serious challenges to Britain, but addressing climate change will bring significant opportunities for British business.
That was the conclusion of a parliamentary event attended by NFU Vice President Guy Smith this week in response to the IPPC report, on weather and climate change.
Mr Smith, who farms near Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, spoke about the need for farmers to recognise that the weather is getting more volatile, as are the markets while the need to invest in farms to make them weatherproof is essential.
“In 2013 on my farm we had the wettest winter in living memory, the strongest winds since 1987, the highest tides since 1953. When you see all that come together in a short window you realise that maybe something is going on.”
Faced with volatility, he said that the art of farming becomes more speculative. “This leads to a lack of confidence in agriculture as to what the future might hold, and my worry is that that may lead to a lack of investment in our farms just when we should be investing more in terms of weather proofing them.”
Meanwhile, Professor David Walker, Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England, said that the increasing frequency of heatwaves forecast for the future presented a particular risk to countries with an ageing population, like Britain.
“The 2003 heatwave saw 70,000 deaths in Europe more then would have been expected had that not happened, and 2,000 of those deaths were in the UK. If climate projections are realised in 30 or 40 years, [2003] would likely be an average summer in the UK.”
The event was chaired by Lord Adair Turner, who suggested that levels of uncertainty about the possible effects of climate change highlighted the need to take precautionary action to “exclude the nasty tails of the distribution”.
He said: “The cost of building a zero-carbon economy cannot possibly be more than a few percentage points of GDP forgone. That follows from every piece of analysis that anybody has done, that follows from the availability of the technologies to reduce the impacts of climate change and reduce emissions.”
