The FT writes, protecting London from extreme weather is a matter of “national security”
Our Take, With Doug Sheridan
The FT writes, protecting London from extreme weather is a matter of “national security”, according to an independent report, which found that flooding, drought and wildfires were putting the UK capital’s economy and citizens at risk.
Preparation for more frequent and extreme climate risks was “non-negotiable”, the London Climate Resilience Review said on Wednesday, estimating that global warming could hit the city’s GDP by 2-3 per cent per year by the middle of the century.
“The lack of co-ordinated preparation for the cascading consequences of climate change across government departments is a clear national security risk,” said Emma Howard Boyd, former chair of the Environmental Agency, who led the review.“This has been known about for years, so we urgently need to see action at pace and scale,” she added.
If London appeared “unable to manage heatwaves and floods, the impact on investor confidence in the national economy would be catastrophic”, Boyd said.
She added that climate resilience must be embedded in the Labour government’s growth agenda and that “adaptation is non-negotiable”.
Boyd said that, as well as ensuring that measures for the built environment, such as the river Thames’s defences, were robust, the government needed to understand the “costs of downtime”.
The review called for local, regional and national governments to work together to enable more investment in climate resilience across the UK.
Our Take: Almost a decade after the Paris Agreement set leaders of nations, states and cities off on a Quixotic mission to limit global temps 75 years from now, they are beginning to figure out that their real responsibilities are the same as they've always been—take care of business in the here and now. Too bad it's taken so long for such a basic truth to dawn on them.