Adaptation and Resilience to a Changing Climate

What is ARCC about?

The Adaptation and Resilience to a Changing Climate (ARCC) Programme brings together a range of projects investigating the impacts of climate change and possible adaptation options in the built environment and its infrastructure including water resources, transport systems, telecommunications, energy and waste.

The ARCC Coordination Network (ACN) fosters networking among the projects, engages stakeholders at all stages of the research process and helps promote the wide dissemination of project outputs.

(See ARCC stories on the LWEC website about the Olympic Park, building design in hospitals, schools and offices to adapt to climate change, and suburban neighbourhood adaptation)

What is the Programme doing?

• Enabling the design of urban systems that are more resilient to climate change
• Providing evidence for decision makers and policy makers
• Increasing the efficient and focussed dissemination of research outputs
• Improving the ability of researchers to engage potential users.

How will the outputs be used?

Many of the projects are providing sector-specific knowledge on practical strategies to enable a wide range of users to meet the challenges presented by climate change. For example, to help:

• design robust water supply infrastructure systems at regional and local levels
• ensure health and social care systems supporting older people will be resilient to climate change
• develop feasible adaptation scenarios to improve resilience in both cities and suburbs in the UK
• improve the adaptive capacity of local communities to the impacts of extreme weather events
• understand the probable nature of the UK infrastructure systems in the future and to explore options to improve resilience.

Projects are informing government plans and policies to improve resilience to and to adapt to climate change as evidenced by inclusion in various Departmental Adaptation Plans and the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment.

All projects are supported by stakeholder groups who help set the project direction and ensure the outcomes are relevant to UK industry and government, nationally and locally.

What tools are available?

Several projects are coming to completion and the emphasis is now on the appropriate dissemination and use of research outputs, for example:

• A prototype decision-support GIS tool has been developed to identify future heat hazards at the building, neighbourhood and city scale for use by local authorities and others to aid long term design and planning in urban areas (SCORCHIO: Sustainable Cities: Options for Responding to Climate Change Impacts and Outcomes - http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/cure/research/scorchio).
• New sets of probabilistic weather years have been developed for the 2030s, 2050s and 2080s for numerous locations across the UK based on the UKCP09 climate projections. These are enabling building designers and engineers to study the energy and thermal performance of buildings under likely future conditions (PROMETHEUS: The use of probabilistic climate data to future proof design decisions in the buildings sector - http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/cee/prometheus).
• New models have been developed to interpret the impact of local climate in urban areas (in particular London) and to evaluate the impacts of temperature on energy use, comfort and health in buildings. A decision support framework to aid decision makers and planners is being developed (LUCID: The Development of a Local Urban Climate Model and its Application to the Intelligent Development of Cities - http://www.lucid-project.org.uk).

PROGRAMME FACTS AND FIGURES:

Start and end dates: 1/1/2007-31/3/2016

LWEC Partners involved: EPSRC and ESRC.

UKCIP is also a partner in this programme.

Website: http://www.ukcip-arcc.org.uk

Contact: arcc@ukcip.org.uk