20140105_R5

Source: BBC Radio 5 Live

URL: N/A

Date: 05/01/2014

Event: Sir David King's "simple notion" - severe weather "may now be happening more frequently"

Credit: BBC Radio 5 Live

People:

• Sir David King: Former Chief Scientific Adviser to H.M. Government, UK
  • Sam Walker: Broadcast journalist

Sam Walker: And more than a hundred flood warnings remain in place across the UK, with the vast majority in England. Heavy rain is expected to hit much of the country today, arriving early in the morning, in the south-west. Well, this comes as the Foreign Secretary's Special Representative for Climate Change, Sir David King, says the government needs to aim to spend more, up to a billion pounds a year, by 2020, and that's in flood defence infrastructure. Well, Sir David King joins us now. Hello, good morning.

Sir David King: Good morning to you.

Sam Walker: Well, firstly I want you to have a listen, if you will, to a little bit of audio from a resident, whose house is in ruins, after the latest floods. Now, he says local residents have never seen anything like this before. Let's have a listen to Martin Starnes and his wife Indra - they're in Leatherhead in Surrey.

Martin Starnes: People who've lived here for decades have never seen it like this. They say the same as us. The river doesn't do this. It floods the floodplain, the fields get wet and then the river goes down and the fields dry out again. In 1968, I gather, during horrendous flooding, this house was not flooded. So how come it floods this time round? Last year we had wet weather for weeks and weeks.

Indra Starnes: Months!

Martin Starnes: The house did not flood. Months.

Indra Starnes: Months. Day after day.

Martin Starnes: Yet it floods after one storm, this time. Something is not right.

Sam Walker: Well, do you think he makes a point, there, um, Sir David? I mean, why do you think we're seeing weather this severe that we haven't seen before?

Sir David King: Well, I think the important thing to get across is the simple notion that storms and severe weather conditions that we might have expected to occur once in a hundred years, say, in the past, may now be happening more frequently, and the reason is, as predicted by scientists, that the climate is changing and as the climate changes, we can anticipate quite a radical change in weather conditions. I mean, back in 2001, I revamped the government's Foresight system, and the first piece of work I did, I convened a team of 110 national experts to specifically investigate the threat of increased flooding and coastline vulnerabilities that the British Isles are likely to face from global warming. Now in that, we made full use of the climate predictions of the British Met Office - and I just have to say that the Met Office is the acknowledged weather and climate service of the world, I mean, it is the best there is - and it was concluded, back in 2004, this 3-year intensive report, that sea-level rise, increased storm surges, increased intensity of rainfall would penetrate further inland, would impact on our towns and cities, and that British coastal defences would be subjected to higher water levels and more energetic wave attack.

Sam Walker: And did the government take this on board? When you made these predictions, did they say "Right, we're going to act on this"?

Sir David King: The report was accepted, it was put into the department concerned and the Environment Agency received a substantial boost in funding at the time. What was recognised was that the potential economic damage runs into tens of billions of pounds per annum. So this was a report that indicated that managing our flood defences, changing our - adapting to the change in rainfall conditions was an extremely worthwhile exercise. The Environment Agency estimated that for every pound invested in flood defences, we will save something like seven or eight pounds in flood damage. So this was seen to be a good investment, and what we did say, by the way, was that the investment should be increased all the way going forward in time, so as to manage flood risk back to the level it was at in 2000. We will never eliminate floods, but the idea was to keep them at a constant level of risk.

Sam Walker: And has that happened?

Sir David King: Well, it did happen initially, but, largely because of the state of the economy, some of that funding was cut back by the previous government, and the present government has maintained a reasonably good level of capital investment. I believe the intention at the moment is that up to £400 million is set aside per annum in infrastructure investment out to 2020. But of course if we really want to manage this problem - and I'm sure that all of us do - we will have to do two things. One: get back to a high investment level in flood defences, and two: push hard on the rest of the world, in terms of mitigating the impacts of climate change. And of course this is the big driver for getting an international agreement on climate change going.

Sam Walker: But people will say there isn't any money. If we had the money, we'd spend the money. But there isn't any. So what's the solution, here?

Sir David King: Well, of course that is the difficulty in an austere time, and when the country is going through difficulties, these real questions are about priorities. Now, my focus is on climate change, it is on the impacts of climate change on the British Isles, and so you won't be surprised to hear me saying that I believe that priority should be given to much more funding to create a better situation, so that we can face up to flooding in a proper manner, on the British Isles.

Sam Walker: Okay, nice to speak to you this morning. Thank you very much there, Sir David King. And we've got a statement from Defra which says "We're currently spending over £2.3 billion on tackling the risk of flooding and coastal erosion. Together with contributions from other partners, there's more money than ever before. We'll also be making record levels of capital investment and we'll be spending over £400 million by 2021. In addition, we provided the Environment Agency with above inflation increases of £5 million on their floods maintenance work in 2015-16. The Environment Agency are making their own choices about how best to use their resources, and have made it clear that they intend to protect front-line services."