Impacts and Risk Assessment to better inform Resilience Planning (IMPRES)

The Met Office, Departments of Food, Environment and Rural Affairs and Business, Enterprise and Industry, and the Environment Agency have issued a document on the perceived user needs for derived products from UKCP18. "Many decision makers will need information about the impacts of the climate changes that are described in the new projections for their specific areas or sectors of interest, for example, future flood or heat stress risk." Other derived products include water stress, drought and vegetation growth. To meet these needs the above agencies suggested several approaches including: 1) Updating an existing product with UKCP18 information. They specifically suggest investigating whether previous research is still valid (in our case with CMIP5 rather than specifically with UKCP09); and 2) Determine whether "specific assessments will need to be undertaken" to "incorporate consideration of UKCP18 into existing or planned research...scope what work is needed for those topics where a risk is identified but the product need is poorly defined."

Furthermore, the Third UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA3) must be produced by Government by January 2022. To inform the report, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has asked the Climate Change Committee's (CCC's) Adaptation Committee to prepare an independent evidence report by summer 2021. This report will require a literature review of recent relevant research on climate change risks to the UK's natural environment, infrastructure, business, people, and international dimensions of the issue.

IMPRES is designed to consider these currently identified needs. IMPRES is designed to use existing CMIP5 driven model output to rapidly scope the risks of climate change on a wide-variety of impacts to identify where in the UK, and at what temperatures these occur. IMPRES speaks directly to inform user needs by rapidly providing new estimates of risks, including heat stress to people and livestock, flood risk, water security and agriculture, biodiversity and natural capital, and the UK economy. IMPRES then goes further by using both of the approaches above - existing data consideration, and scope the work necessary to use the UKCP18 data when needed. We have access to two sets of climate change projections, an existing dataset derived by the Tyndall Centre from global circulation models (GCMs) and a more detailed dataset recently released with greater spatial and temporal detail in the UK region, known as UKCP18. Previous assessments of climate-change related risk in the UK have tended to use disparate socioeconomic and climate scenarios, and our project will be ground-breaking in using a harmonised set of scenarios to project future levels of risk across human and natural systems in the UK in a spatially explicit fashion. We begin by using the existing climate dataset to project the risks, and then go on to prepare to do so with the UKCP18 data. Since processing and utilising the UKCP18 in full would be a large amount of work beyond the scope of this project, we instead perform a scoping study to lay out a work plan for doing this, and then go on to implement a very small part of this work plan to provide an initial assessment of risks from heat stress (to people and livestock) and drought. Throughout, we engage with stakeholders by disseminating our findings to them, and by holding workshops or bilateral meetings to identify their needs, so that we can factor these in to our work plan. In particular, these needs might relate to the metrics we use to describe levels of risk, or to the socioeconomic scenarios that we will explore. The first part of our project uses existing published risk assessment methodologies and complements well some existing work that we are performing which is to assess risks in some other (non-UK) countries.

A key component of our IMPRES project is the communications work package which will communication of results of the project and co-production of future risk metrics. WP1 is a rapid assessment of the risks of a wide range of impacts in the UK. We will prepare a series of communication products (see WP3) to disseminate to a range of Stakeholders for feedback. Stakeholders have already requested information on a number of impacts in the UK (https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/collaboration/ukcp). The first phase of the project will produce a prioritised list of quantified spatially explicit estimates of the climate-change related risks to the UK in human and natural systems. Stakeholders need the information as quickly as possible in order to begin resiliency planning. Stakeholders being targeted initially include BEIS, DEFRA, the Environment Agency, Natural England, the National Trusts, the Wildlife Trusts, Farming Groups and other elements of Civil Society. A workshop is planned to present the results from our project's first phase to these groups to receive feedback on the choice of metrics and socioeconomic scenarios and whether additional or modified metrics or scenarios should be scoped put in the second part of the project. While these are the Stakeholders initially identified, we have designed the project to have broader outreach (i.e., water service providers such as Anglian Water). This will be achieved not only through infographics but also in providing the end data analyses and GIS raster layers as open access for them to use in their management planning.

The Third UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA3) must be produced by Government by January 2022. To inform the report, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has asked the Climate Change Committee's (CCC's) Adaptation Committee to prepare an independent evidence report by summer 2021. This report will require a literature review of recent relevant research on climate change risks to the UK's natural environment, infrastructure, business, people, and international dimensions of the issue. Our project speaks directly to inform the review by providing new estimates of the risks to important components of these elements, including heat stress to people and livestock, flood risk, water security and agriculture, biodiversity and natural capital. We will then submit these analyses to a peer-reviewed journal, potentially as a special issue. Importantly, we then extend our analysis to create an economic assessment, which will be of relevance to business. We have discussed the project with Kathryn Brown, Head of Adaptation for the Climate Change Committee, and she would provide a key link with the planned work on CCRA3. Warren (PI) led the methodology chapter of CCRA2 so has a long history of engagement with the CCC and work on the CCRA2.

Finally, WP1 of IMPRES compliments work being performed for BEIS for six other countries (see letter of support). This allows for a direct comparison of impacts and risks to the UK with risks in these six other countries (including China and India).