The UKGBC has responded to the Government’s National Adaptation Programme (NAP3) which sets the strategy for the next five years of responding to the rapidly changing climate.
The plan outlines how Defra and other departments will act to adapt the UK’s homes, buildings, and natural environment to deal with climate change, including new funding for research and projects to empower effective decision-making for climate resilience.
Earlier in the year, the UK’s Climate Change Committee called NAP3 a ‘make or break’ moment to improve the country’s preparedness
Louise Hutchins, UKGBC Head of Policy and Public Affairs, said: “Extreme heat, flooding and drought hitting Europe right now leaves little to the imagination about what climate catastrophe will look like, and makes clear that the UK’s homes and buildings just aren’t designed for this new normal.
“While the third National Adaptation Programme is an important step forward and sets out some welcome new initiatives including mandatory water efficiency labelling, it needed be an urgent and ambitions plan to adapt to increasingly severe, frequent, and extreme weather like last year’s heatwaves which took nearly 3,000 lives in the UK. That nationwide approach to adapt our homes and workplaces is largely missing. We need a national effort to install measures like shutters, insulation, reflective paint, and water-efficient fixtures and fittings in our homes and buildings and shady trees and green spaces in our neighbourhoods.
“The Adaptation Programme points to the importance its forthcoming planning National Planning Policy Framework reforms for some of the answers. But the Government has an open goal in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, currently in its final stages in Parliament, to accept UKGBC-backed amendments that would align the planning system with our climate change and nature restoration goals, and put an end to a range of measures that make no sense given the climate emergency, such as new homes being built on flood-planes without proper protection.
“Over the next few months, UKGBC will be collaborating across the industry and with the government to build on this Programme and accelerate our pathway to greater climate resilience.”
