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olly watts

I’m working with the Met Office on new climate change projections for the UK, due next spring. A version of this post appeared in the project team’s newsletter.

Nature – the animals and plants which provide the setting and powerhouse for our own lives - is beset by a range of impacts from climate change.  A climate signal has been widespread across nature in the UK for some 30 years now, and I work to develop the strategies and actions that will enable our natural world to cope with climate change.

The RSPB’s scientists and ecologists use the UKCP09 projections in computer modelling for both individual species and our nature reserves.  Alongside this, I’m interested in qualitative approaches for assessing climate change impacts for a much wider range of audiences.

One such audience is the partnerships that come together to improve conditions for nature across whole landscapes – the RSPB’s Futurescapes programme.  Our workshops bring people together, with interested parties as diverse as farmers, foresters, water and coastal managers, the Ministry of Defence, representatives from heritage, tourist and recreational interests from each Futurescape project to work alongside nature conservation staff. They spend the day learning about the future climate of the area, assessing direct and indirect impacts and discussing adaptation measures for the priority impacts they’ve identified.

Gaining an understanding about the local future climate is crucial to gaining a successful outcome from these workshops.  We look at the likely range of future climate conditions, using the 10% and 90% probability levels for changes in temperature and precipitation from the UKCP09 projections. And we frame the future in terms of 2°C and 4°C average global temperature increases, real-world situations that link to climate mitigation ambitions. The 2°C world provides a pertinent planning timescale, 20 to 25 years, and is the main focus for the workshop. The 4°C world indicates a more distant future state that can help to inform relevant action now and highlight the need to avoid this world.

Two interesting things have emerged from these workshops.  First, people are often shocked when they discover the extent to which climate is expected to change in their area, and in a timeframe that’s highly relevant to their lives.  And second, we need to make climate projections more accessible to a much wider range of people.

The workshop discussions that follow from this qualitative use of the UKCP09 projections, guided by a clear sequence of logical questions, have been universally positive, without exception. It’s been encouraging to see how the different interests in each landscape area seek ways to adapt together, from sharing a common understanding of the climate problem to gaining insights into its impacts on the various aspects that combine to form a living, working landscape.  As such, our climate workshops have helped build the landscape partnership itself and produce clear adaptation strategies for incorporating into the management plans of the RSPB’s Futurescapes.

So what’s useful from this for new climate projections?  It’s helped me become fervently aware that, alongside the requirements of the scientific community, we need to present climate change in the UK in ways that can be easily picked up in everyday life.  There’s a significant and widespread knowledge gap about climate change, across professional, business and community audiences, which we must fix. Achieving this will contribute to much more effective adaptation, taken in advance of serious impacts rather than as a response to them.  And we’ll also help to win support for the massive shift in our energy generation and use that’s required to contain climate change to levels that will allow healthy natural environments and human societies to persist.