Climate change UK - mind the gap!

Mapping individuals’ actions to national challenges

The UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) advises the government on how to tackle and prepare for climate change. Under the Climate Change Act of 2008, the UK government releases a Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA), which is informed by the CCC’s independent advice report.

The last CCRA identified a gap in knowledge around what actions people in the UK were already undertaking to address or prepare for the impacts of climate change. Therefore, the CCC commissioned AECOM to conduct research to address this knowledge gap, which has subsequently informed the third independent CCRA, released in January 2022.

Finding and fixing risky behaviors

In a truly collaborative approach, we partnered with Sustainability West Midlands (SWM), Sniffer, Climate Northern Ireland (CNI) and London Climate Change Partnership (LCCP), on an extensive research project to understand the effect of different behaviors on climate change risk. This considered different hazards (such as flooding and droughts), target groups (including households, land managers, small and medium enterprises), landscape types and socioeconomic circumstances in the UK.

We carried out both primary and secondary research, including a systematic literature review to identify current findings on the types of self-directed adaptation behaviors present in the UK, the underlying factors driving adaptation behavior, how these behaviors impact risk, and how incentives could be used to increase or decrease behaviors.

Rigor and engagement reveal urgent truths

We then developed and facilitated a new methodology termed the National Importance Score, which included surveys and semi-structured interviews in six locations across the UK, to rank the importance of identified behaviors against their impact on risk.

Fundamental to the project was our continuous engagement and collaboration with key stakeholders and experts throughout the research to ensure the robustness of our methodology and findings. This methodology aligns with the CCC’s urgency risk scoring framework and provides a high-level decision-making support tool for policymakers and practitioners.

Together with the other studies conducted in preparation of the CCRA3, our research contributed to the conclusion that action to improve the UK’s resilience is falling behind the impacts of climate change risks facing the UK and that more needs to be done.