Heatwaves, droughts and wildfires in 2022 raised questions about how prepared the UK is for ex-treme events and how they might become more frequent in the future. This paper reviews the im-plications of climate change for current emergency planning, and for emergency planning as an adaptation to climate change, using the UK as an example. There are seven key implications for current operational emergency planning: risk assessment needs to consider a broader range of events and changing likelihoods, a long-term perspective is necessary, response capabilities may need to be enhanced, some types of events will become less frequent but will not be eliminated, training and exercises need to consider novel events, public engagement and messaging needs to be revised to reflect increased severity of events, and improving resilience is necessary to reduce the need for emergency response. Many organisations include emergency planning as part of their climate change adaptation toolkit. However, relying on current or enhanced emergency planning procedures is unlikely to be a sufficient adaptation to a changing climate. Improved re-silience in some sectors will reduce the need for emergency planning and response, but it will not be feasible to improve resilience everywhere: the focus for emergency planning is therefore likely to evolve to reflect diverging impacts of climate change in and between communities. Achieving a balance between measures to increase resilience and measures to manage events requires a dis-cussion on appropriate standards for resilience and definitions of 'emergency'. Improving the co-ordination between emergency planning and climate change adaptation is essential to reduce current and future risks.
Arnell, NW
The implications of climate change for emergency planning
International Journal Of Disaster Risk Reduction