Leeds Climate Commission has created a repository of climate resilience and adaptation information that can be used by anyone working in the field.
The datasets and documents, which span all geographic scales from the national to the hyper-local in Leeds, provide a mass of intelligence with links to policies, strategies, statements and reports from UK Government, Leeds City Council, agencies, utilities, business and environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
The documents were curated by Lauren Fraser, a graduate in Earth and Environmental Science from Cardiff University, working under the guidance of Leeds Climate Commission. They have been placed on Data Mill North, a collaborative website originally set up by Leeds City Council and now managed by ODI Leeds.
Data Mill North is thought to be the first platform in the country that brings together Open Data information from multiple sectors across the city – and, most importantly, helps people to use that data creatively to gain understanding and new service solutions. The climate resilience documents, available as links to XLS and CSV files, provide a wealth of resources for doing this.
Documents include national reports, such as The National Adaptation Programme: Making the Country Resilient to a Changing Climate (2013) and The Heatwave Plan for England (2016) by the Department for Health England and NHS England; regional action plans like the West Yorkshire Adaptation Plan (2010); city-scale reviews, including the Update Report on Climate Change Adaptation in Leeds (2016); reports by public utilities, such as Yorkshire Water’s Enhancing Resilience to Weather and Reducing Carbon Emissions: our blueprint for Yorkshire climate change strategy, and at the other end of the scale, links to websites in Leeds actively pursuing climate resilience projects (eg the Back to Front interactive map).
Other useful resources for investigators among the many listed include a series of interviews with experts from 14 local resilience forums in England, conducted on behalf of the Committee on Climate Change to accompany the Adaptation Sub-Committee’s 2017 report, Progress on Preparing for Climate Change.
Included in the repository is the UK Climate Projections 2018 (UKCP18) project overview , compiled by the Met Office, Defra, Dept for BEIS and the Environment Agency, with infographics that illustrate how the UK climate may change over the 21st century.
As well as observations on historic climate events, the projections include marine projections (for sea level rise and storm surge) and a series of projections over land at a range of scales from 60 km (plausible futures) to 25km (problematic projections) and downscaled high resolution projections at 12 km and even 2.2km. The projections, deemed essential to future climate change risk assessments, are designed to help guide adaptation in line with the National Adaptation Programme.
This invaluable resource will be updated at a future date (but not continuously) and is easy and straightforward to access via Data Mill North.
Our thanks to Lauren Fraser for her excellent work in bringing together all these key documents and datasets. If there are other links that you think have been omitted, please email us at info@leeds.candocities.org
