WSP to investigate climate change consequences for UK infrastructure

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has appointed climate resilience experts at WSP to conduct research and identify the effects climate change risks have within the natural environment, built environment and infrastructure sectors.

Findings will support the government’s third UK Climate Change Risk Assessment which is due to be published in 2021 and will help policy makers better understand how to achieve effective adaptation outcomes at least cost and avoid unintended consequences.

WSP is responsible for the overall delivery of the project and will lead the review of existing systems models and look at applying a systems lens to understand what climate risks might mean for society in the future.

“This is an important project that will make significant contributions to the third UK Climate Change Risk Assessment evidence report”, said Dr Paul Munday, climate resilience lead at WSP. “Effective adaptation to climate change cannot be undertaken without careful consideration of the cross-cutting nature of risks, and trade-offs or synergies between the actions that we take to adapt. Understanding how risks interact is critical for assessing the overall costs and benefits of developing policy interventions.”

Partnering with WSP and working collaboratively to bring together expertise from across the sectors, Risk Solutions (alongside ADAS and UCL), will lead the development of a dependency model to capture interacting risks (and cascades) across the built environment, natural environment and infrastructure sectors.  

Work on the project has now commenced and will continue until January 2020.