Hampshire County Council: Year of Resilience

The County Council set a target for climate resilience acknowledging the significant impact of climate change on our communities, our infrastructure, and the services we deliver. Climate resilience is crucial, in light of impacts being felt in Hampshire and around the world such as rising temperatures, increased flooding and more extreme weather events, such as the July 2022 heatwave. Climate change does not just cause physical or financial damage, it can also have much deeper, longer-term effects on health and wellbeing. For these reasons, the Council is not only focused on reducing emissions but also on building resilience. However, resilience is often not as well recognised as carbon mitigation.

In recognition of the importance of building resilience, the County Council declared 2022 the “Year of Climate Resilience”. This provided an opportunity for the Council to raise awareness of what climate resilience is, promote their unique approach and the actions they are taking to build resilience.

To embed climate change considerations across all key decisions and ensure that departments within Hampshire County Council are also considering how they can increase resilience to climate change, all Decision Reports now must include a climate change impact assessment. The climate adaptation decision tool allows staff to assess the vulnerability of their projects to climate change impacts, such as heatwaves and flooding. This can help staff understand what the potential climate impacts on their projects could be and help them consider what can be done to adapt them to help build resilience both now and in the future.

Action is also being taken across Hampshire County Council to make sure the services we provide, and the county is resilient to the changing climate. They know that joined-up partnership working will be vital to achieving this, for example through nature-based solutions to flooding, looking after public health, woodland creation and generating local renewable energy.

Work is also underway to develop a resilience campaign aimed at residents which will be launched later in 2022. General awareness of what resilience to climate change is and the actions that can be taken are low, in comparison to carbon mitigation. The campaign will focus on clear actions that residents can take to prepare for different forms of climate impacts such as during heatwaves, flooding, drought, extreme weather. This will take the form of a dedicated webpage, with social media adverts directing residents to this information.

To understand how staff feel about using the climate change tools, the climate change team sent out a survey to report authors and also met with democratic link officers from each department. The survey results indicated that most report authors found writing a climate change impact assessment within a decision report easy, and 67 per cent said that the process of completing the climate change impact assessment increased their awareness of carbon mitigation and climate change resilience. Project leads have been highly motivated to use the climate change adaptation decision tool, seeing them as adding value to their projects.

A video highlighting all the excellent work on building climate resilience across the County Council has been developed and was launched at a Hampshire 2050 event in July 2022. It was received well by all attendees.

A year-round approach will be taken for the resident resilience campaign, with adverts ready to be launched during pivotal moments, such as during a flood event. The Council expects this to generate the most engagement, as they know that resilience is not at the forefront of their minds until confronted with the issue. The campaign will be managed with the corporate marketing and insights teams to ensure the messaging is targeted and engaging for the target audience.

So that their policy and interventions could be based on robust evidence, the climate change team tasked the County Council’s Insight and Engagement Unit with delivering initial research to inform our approach to behaviour change. 23 citizen climate actions were assessed, including climate resilience actions such as modifying your home to be more resilient to heat and drought or flooding. What became clear is that finance is a key motivator, and equally a barrier, to being able to take on resilience measures.

As a result, benefits such as energy cost savings from insulation will be explained throughout the resident resilience campaign, and climate change benefits may only be used as a secondary, rather than primary message. A tiered approach will be used to make the actions as widely applicable as possible. They may range from free, easy actions like making DIY draught excluders or letting your garden grow wild, to installing insulation for the more determined.

Kerry Raybone

[email protected]