Our climate has already changed dramatically. For our citizens, communities, and economies, the risks that accompany the new present and an uncertain future are huge. That’s why strategic investments in adaptive resilience, guided by data insights and collaboration are key to cost-effective adaptation. Done effectively, climate resilience offers opportunities to reimagine more sustainable, equitable and resilient ecosystems - if we act fast and collectively.
A growing intensity of flooding, droughts, and extreme weather events: climate change is here. Strengthening resilience to these worsening threats is no longer just wise planning, but an urgent necessity. Resilience used to be secondary to the critical task of tackling carbon emissions. Yet with every year that passes, the costs of inaction are both increasing and increasingly clear. We must adapt to a changing world if we’re to avoid devastating impacts to our infrastructure, habitats and economies, right at the same time we need them to perform better than ever to decarbonise. Resilience can no longer be put off.
However, to meet the scale and pace of this challenge, we must approach resilience intelligently. Building bigger, stronger, and deeper can lock in more carbon emissions and trigger additional expenses. Companies can invest too much, or too soon, or in sub-optimal pathways that the passage of time will render inadequate, insufficient or unsustainable. Instead, we need an adaptive approach, where sustainable investment is strengthened gradually over time, reinforced by continual monitoring and informed by up-to-date learnings that leads to a long line of low-regret decisions.
Better use of data and greater collaboration hold the key to making that happen. Only data can yield the insights needed to accurately pinpoint shared vulnerabilities, project future threats, and improve the quality of decision-making to execute smart adaptations. And only collaboration at scale will enable the coordination and knowledge sharing sufficient to embed resilience across every sector, at every level. That’s a huge challenge, but we’re better equipped than ever before to meet it.
Smart approaches to adaptation
Water companies provide a useful case study for demonstrating the challenges of resilience. In the UK, there simply hasn’t been sufficient investment for building long term climate resilience. Now the water utilities face compounding climate risks - from more intense droughts threatening water resources, rainfall overwhelming urban drainage, , to changing soil moisture conditions causing ground subsidence that damages buried infrastructure. The interrelated nature of these challenges makes it all more difficult – creaking infrastructure undermines our ability to respond to future challenges, sapping investor confidence, public support, and precious resources. A change of approach is therefore sorely needed.
Greater awareness and better asset management can deliver positive change. But as climate risk proliferates, water companies need adaptive plans and pathways, monitoring and responding to risks, and informing long-term investment that will be acceptable to regulators. Nature-based solutions have to play a major role alongside smart technologies. Real-time sensor networks, climate risk analyses, and scenario modelling can help prioritise the most at-risk assets for enhancement, such as identifying blockages and capacity deficits in wastewater networks. But since available funds are finite, difficult trade-offs around costs and benefits remain.
That’s why risk-based prioritisation methods are essential. They must capture the policy landscape, reputational and legal risks, as well as physical climate risk. Through broad and transparent collection of data, climate-proofed value for investment is possible. But without robust climate risk and adaptation assessments, there is a clear danger of stumbling on the difficult course ahead. Like other organisations threatened by a changing climate, water companies need access to sustainable finance, reducing their borrowing costs by meeting sustainability criteria. Integration is now no longer a nice-to-have idea, it’s vital.
In 2021, the City of Edinburgh commissioned AtkinsRéalis to guide the city through the development of a climate risk and adaptation assessment. Evaluating both risk and adaptation opportunities depended upon early-stage input from a range of stakeholders. That’s why we facilitated interactive, multidisciplinary workshops spanning infrastructure operators, health and environmental agencies from Edinburgh and Scotland, and public sector organisations. This collaboration allowed us to rapidly gain inputs and insights, and develop consensus across stakeholders of key priorities.
It also enriched our analysis of Edinburgh's climate risk profile based on UK climate projections (UKCP18), the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA), and case studies of the impacts and costs of climate hazards across the city. In turn, this informed our climate risk mapping, harnessing public data and GIS to identify risk hotspot locations and infrastructure vulnerabilities across transport, health, and the built and natural environment. Informed with these insights, we produced an adaptation assessment considering progress, highlighting both the barriers to climate adaptation and best practice case studies of successful solutions. Armed with an integrated, informed, and insightful climate risk and adaptation assessment, Edinburgh is equipped to take the next steps with confidence.
Collaboration for resilience and recovery
At the same time, we also need to face up to the tough reality that some things cannot be prevented, and plan accordingly. If cost far outweighs benefit (say, in areas where it is uneconomical to prevent flooding during severe events) we must instead increase the speed of recovery through adaptation instead. Water companies and resilience partnerships work with communities to build resilience, raising awareness and reducing both impacts and costs. These can take the form of better warning systems, strategies at the property-level to reduce damage (such as moving valuable items from ground to upper floors), or plans to best help people get back to normal and get critical infrastructure working again.
Resilience is a team effort. That means data is only as good as its context, so collaboration and sharing between different bodies is crucial - successful recovery depends hugely on how well efforts are coordinated. For example, the Environment Agency (EA) in the UK has the overall strategic oversight for surface water flood resilience, but Local Authorities actually own a lot of the infrastructure and land. Their asset maintenance, land use, and public awareness raising in turn has a huge impact on surface water flooding. Water companies, meanwhile, own the water and drainage infrastructure. Therefore, these three stakeholders (together with others) must work together to reduce risk of surface water flooding, pooling their resources to invest in projects to improve flooding, and empower people to take action.
Furthermore, collaboration must also extend to the public. Only individuals can close their curtains on the hottest days to reduce heat, or ventilate at night, for example; so people must be properly informed and equipped to take appropriate action. Networks can help to disseminate change. For example, the London Climate Change Partnership (LCCP), led by the Greater London Authority and the EA, is a collective of organisations including infrastructure owners, service providers, and community groups sharing best practice around resilience and advocating for local action on climate change. AtkinsRéalis is proud to be supporting LCCP to make London a more resilient, inclusive, and liveable city.
Resilience is an opportunity
Anticipate, adapt, monitor; these will be the hallmarks of data-based approaches and partnerships. We need to know when to trigger action, what to anticipate, and how to expedite recovery. We need collaborative adaptation plans, to implement strategies and measures that keep people safe and keep ecosystems secure. Without coordinated efforts, asset owners and operators will continue to struggle to chart the best course through the available multitude of options, risking sub-optimal resilience and recovery plans.
At AtkinsRéalis, we understand this clearly - because we’re multidisciplinary through and through. We work across sectors, across the world, bringing together multifaceted approaches to strategy, planning and commercialisation. We’ve worked with water companies for years to build drought resilience plans, and have helped multilateral development banks establish their own climate risk systems, explore how climate change could affect investment viability, and embed those considerations into systems to support long-term resilience.
Rising to the great climate challenge is filled with daunting threats. But the opportunities are huge too. Climate change isn’t just about the climate. Indirect changes to the global economy, markets, regulations, and consumer behaviour will reshape the world. By proactively exploring, anticipating, and preparing for these changes, we can change the narrative from despair to hope - and embed the resilience that our communities deserve. Building resilience is a chance to imagine more liveable and inclusive cities for everyone, and to restore our connection to nature. For example, we can scarcely imagine being able to swim in the River Thames. But Paris has committed to a swimmable Seine by 2025. For all the changes, for all the challenges, adapting our society can bring untold benefits - if we are proactive, collaborate, and value resilience and natural capital in our investment decisions.
