Monitoring Climate Change Adaptation: Lessons from Scotland

Abstract

The growing scale and frequency of the consequences of climate change are writ large across local, regional and international landscapes and increasingly require governments to develop policies and action plans that can effectively reduce and manage the impacts of more extreme weather on their social, economic and physical systems. In order to Mitigate, one has to measure how well policies to effect changes in such national systems are working, how well, in fact, they are resulting in successful adaption to an altered world. Scotland has pioneered the development of its own locally appropriate Adaptation Indicators within the framework of a Scottish Climate Change Adaptation Programme (SCCAP). This has been funded to address the impacts identified for Scotland in the first UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA). A first set of indicators developed relates to the impacts on populations of extreme weather and climate events in the contexts of the built and natural environments. As the hazards posed by a changing climate manifest themselves and escalate, regions are preparing action plans to protect themselves against those growing impacts over time. There is an important role to be played here by built environment professionals in the development of such national indicator sets and the implementation of the related climate mitigation and adaptation action plans. This paper sets out how we in Scotland approached the challenge of developing related indicator sets, some of the lessons learnt in framing them and challenges identified in doing so.