Risk Assessment and Climate Action Planning with Staffordshire County Council

The challenge

In the UK, 40°C was exceeded for the first time during a July 2022 heatwave, leading to public service disruption, infrastructure damage, and excess deaths. Under projected future climate change, the country is also predicted to face risks from extreme events such as intensified flooding and wildfires that could impact communities, public health, agriculture, nature and the economy. To reduce the future severity of these risks, greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced globally. However, due to historic and continuing emissions, a certain level of climate change is already locked in and hence adaptation action is required to ensure society and nature can continue to thrive in spite of growing climate risks.

In Staffordshire, the County Council has a key role to play in addressing these challenges. Declaring a climate emergency in 2019, the council committed to achieving net zero emissions for its services by 2050. It published an adaptation strategy in 2023 to manage climate risks and ensure resilience in its policies and actions. In 2024, a strategic framework was introduced to integrate climate mitigation and adaptation across all council operations. The council was then in the process of reviewing its climate change action plan to incorporate new and refreshed adaptation and mitigation measures.

To support that process, Aether was engaged to provide an independent expert review of the draft plan and climate change risk assessment (CCRA) which were produced by Staffordshire’s Climate Change Team.

The solution

Aether was engaged by Staffordshire County Council to review preliminary work the council had undertaken to understand climate risk in Staffordshire and develop an action plan for both climate adaptation and mitigation. The risk assessment was reviewed against the third UK climate change risk assessment (CCRA3) to ensure that all relevant risks identified at the national level had been captured locally, and evidence was drawn from the CCRA3 technical report to identify possible impacts of these risks on different areas of the council’s service provision. This required a mapping of the risks to the council’s responsibilities.

Having refined and expanded on the initial list of risks and impacts, Aether made recommendations for possible adaptation actions the council could take to address them, drawing on Staffordshire’s existing policies and strategies, discussion with council officers and a database of local authority adaptation actions we had recently developed as part of our review of adaptation planning in Scottish public bodies.

Alongside this work on risk and adaptation, Aether also reviewed Staffordshire’s mitigation-related actions, and undertook a high-level, qualitative assessment of the potential scale of GHG reductions that they could achieve. Where possible, our recommendations considered the synergies and possible trade-offs of adaptation and mitigation action, as well as interactions with wider policy goals such as improved health, wellbeing and biodiversity.

The result

Many of the adaptation actions in the plan involved undertaking further research or engagement with stakeholders, so the next priority for the council would be to start to engage with partners, and looking to secure funding and resources to carry out the initiatives that were proposed. Aether’s review also led to a number of key recommendations to strengthen Staffordshire’s adaptation planning and make their risk assessment process more robust, including providing training on climate risk to council officers and developing a monitoring and evaluation system for the action plan.

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