Planning by postcode

A press release from Newcastle University: The ability of cities to combat the cause of climate change and to adapt to future weather patterns depends on where we live in the UK, new research suggests. Scientists at Newcastle University have revealed a “postcode lottery of preparedness” across the country based on what each city is doing to not only reduce greenhouse emissions but also adapt to future climate change and extremes of weather such as flooding and drought.

Devising a new way of ranking cities - the ‘Urban Climate Change Preparedness Scores’ - the team scored 30 cities based on four levels of readiness: Assessment, Planning, Action and Monitoring.

Publishing their results today in the academic journal Climatic Change, they reveal huge variation across the UK with London and Leicester gaining the highest scores both for adaptation and mitigation and Wrexham and Derry the lowest.

Newcastle University’s Dr Oliver Heidrich who led the research said it highlighted at a glance the “state of readiness” across the country and how prepared we are for the future.

“Of the 30 cities we assessed, all of them acknowledged that climate change was a threat and all except two had a strategy or policy in place to reduce emissions and also adapt to cope better with future weather patterns, in particular flooding,” explains Dr Heidrich, a senior researcher in the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences….

Town Hall Square in Leicester, shot by NotFromUtrecht, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license