Climate Change Act & Adaptation

Climate Change Act and Adaptation

The Climate Change Bill became law in November 2008, and the Climate Change Act sets out UK Government commitments to addressing both the causes and consequences of climate change.

Part 4 of the Act sets out the responsibilities in relation to the impact of and adaptation to climate change. This includes ‘the duty of the Secretary of State to lay reports before Parliament containing an assessment of the risks for the United Kingdom of the current and predicted impact of climate change’; this is referred to as the Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA).  

The first CCRA must go to Parliament no later than three years after the Act entered into force (thus November 2011), and subsequent reports no later than five years after each previous report.  There is therefore a continuing statutory obligation to repeat the risk assessment process every five years.

Following the publication of the CCRA the Act sets out the duty for the relevant Northern Ireland Departments to lay programmes before the Northern Ireland Assembly setting out:

• the objectives of the department in relation to adaptation to climate change;
• the department’s proposals and policies for meeting those objectives; and
• the time-scales for introducing those proposals and policies.