Maximising UK adaptation to climate change hub

The Climate Change Committee's third Risk Assessment (CCRA3) set out a comprehensive analysis of climate-related risks. In response, UK Government published the Third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3). However, there is a large gap between what we need to be doing to protect the wellbeing of the environment, people and the economy in the UK and what we are doing. Further, we should be looking to leverage the co-benefits of action to improve wellbeing outcomes through adaptation.

The Maximising UK adaptation to climate change hub (the Hub) will help catalyse existing knowledge, especially that existing in the Devolved Administrations, to advance progress in the UK towards the Government's adaptation programme. The Hub links UK national and regional adaptation networks and knowledge exchange organisations with multidisciplinary researcher expertise across eight HEIs, to produce a UK-wide research network on adaptation, and to deliver rapid policy- and practitioner-responsive research. This powerful new science-policy mechanism will be a new national capability for an effective and transformational programme of adaptation.

Key to the Hub is leveraging the activities, networks and knowledge of existing adaptation partnerships and knowledge exchange organisations who are already doing the work. These organisations identified five priorities, based on their current bottlenecks and frustrations:

Assess and address barriers to awareness and engagement with adaptation;
Explore the efficacy of Welsh and Scottish approaches to wellbeing and future generations for adaptation for UK wide justice-oriented approaches;
Increase understanding of system complexity by establishing an inter-sectoral community of practice;
Address aspects of policy, legislation and regulation that hold back the adaptation vision proposed in the NAP;
Enhance the accessibility and understanding of climate model results for decision-makers.
Working in teams of universities and knowledge exchange organisations throughout the UK will carry out activities that can help increase levels of capacity and knowledge to address these challenges. We will:

Carry out training and capacity building on adaptation as the means to network and bring different communities of practice together;
Generate more useful data by integrating different risk and exposure models together, and working with end users to provide the data they need;
Funding collaborations of researchers and practitioners to trial transformational adaptation in order to collect data on what works;
Address policy challenges in real-time, supporting UK governments to accelerate adaptation;
Bring together adaptation researchers who will be funded under the same research programme to improve how we do, and communicate, adaptation research.
Research related activities will involve: i) place-based research in each of the Hub's spokes (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales); ii) the delivery of a programme of grants, across the sector, through a Flexible Fund, encouraging academic and practitioner collaboration on climate adaptation at local and national scale, and focusing on implementation projects to generate insight into what works, and projects that analyse, so as to overcome, institutional and policy barriers to action; and iii) coordination with UKRI's wider transformative adaptation programme, to synthesise findings from research and maximise their translation into actionable insights.

At the end of the three years, we will have produced integrated sectoral pathways to a well-adapted UK, a better understanding of the policy landscape and new advisory mechanisms to support policymakers, accelerated action on adaptation by starting projects that were in the pipeline, and better ways of embedding vulnerability and justice-oriented approaches into adaptation priorities.