Climate adaptation

We have been speaking to teams across the Council to ask them how they are preparing for hazards like extreme heat and flooding to understand their response plans and how they could reduce the chance of these events severely impacting the work they do. We have produced a first draft of a climate risk assessment for many of our Council services, alongside actions for responding to these risks to reduce their impact. This complements the research we completed that informed our climate adaptation report (PDF, 284KB) for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) pilot project. 

This focus on Council operations is a start but we know that climate change will affect the whole of Colchester, so planning a response requires an approach involving multiple organisations including emergency services, businesses, community groups and more. We will be doing more work in 2025 to understand how best to approach this. This will build on work carried out by existing partnerships we are part of in the Essex Resilience Forum which help prepare emergency response plans for many different risks including climate related hazards.