Adaptation & Resilience: Planning & Action for Manchester

Climate change is a defining social, technical and scientific challenge of our time, posing an immense, potentially existential threat to our way of life. As outlined by the UKCP18, the impacts of climate change for the UK - a hotter, wetter climate with increased incidents of extreme weather - are here and will only be exacerbated in the future. This is the new normal, and we must adapt to it. But although there is high-level consensus regarding the urgent need for climate change adaptation, there is less clarity regarding what this means in practice and how this should be achieved.

Manchester Climate Change Partnership is a consortium of 60 organisations from across 10 sectors, comprising 20% of the city's economy, and with significant influence over the remaining 80%. The Partnership is coordinated by the Manchester Climate Change Agency (MCCA). Since 2018, MCCA has established a robust city-level and sector-level policy framework to enable action on climate change. However, as yet, adaptation and resilience has not had the same level of focused policy development or action as the city's mitigation commitments. The placement will co-produce a climate change resilience and adaptation policy and action planning framework with the Manchester Climate Change Partnership (MCCP), putting adaptation and resilience on the same footing as the city's mitigation commitments.

Specifically, the project places an academic with considerable expertise in climate change resilience and adaptation research, a proven track record in developing work of policy and practice relevance, and experience of stakeholder governance, to act as MCCA's 'Resilience and Adaptation Lead' for the 12-month project. Working collaboratively, and underpinned by the latest resilience and adaptation science, the researcher, staff at MCCA and members of MCCP will establish a SMART city-level adaptation and resilience objective for the city's climate change strategy (V. 2.0 of Manchester Climate Change Framework 2020-25) and an associated robust, trustworthy monitoring regime. The project will also support organisations and sectors from across Manchester to develop bespoke commitments and actions and build capacity for their implementation. To support and enable the delivery of these commitments, the project will also develop the existing local policy framework and identify where new policies are required.

The co-produced outputs of the work will have three guiding principles:
- It will be underpinned by the latest science to ensure stakeholders have a clear understanding of Manchester's risks and vulnerabilities to the changing climate;
- It will include an analysis of 'what works' in terms of the co-development of adaptation and resilience policies and plans;
- It will engage and build capacity and momentum across MCCP stakeholders.

The project is designed to leave a longer legacy of benefits. It will construct policy appraisal infrastructure through a monitoring and reporting regime, and through the creation of a new MCCP Adaptation and Resilience Advisory Group that will help the Partnership monitor and drive progress after the project has ended.

We must harness the knowledge locked away in our universities, with the technical abilities and entrepreneurial spirit of our private sector, the creativity of our arts and cultural sectors, and the energy of our people through youth groups, civil society and impassioned communities to build a more resilient, more adaptive Manchester. Together this project co-creates an evidence-based policy framework for climate change adaptation and will conduct primary research that showcases Manchester's evolving resilience to climate variability.