Climate change-influenced weather events could disrupt power supplies, supply chains, ICT, telecommunications and travel, besides causing floods and destroying buildings, said Defra's Caroline Spelman yesterday. Future-proofing ourselves from this potential damage is an essential and urgent task.

Spelman issued a stark warning: "Our economy is built on effective transport and communications networks and reliable energy and water supplies. But the economy cannot grow if there are repeated power failures, or goods cannot be transported because roads are flooded and railways have buckled, or if intense rainfall or high temperatures disrupt Wi-Fi signals."

She urged that the £200 billion expected to be invested in the UK's infrastructure over the next five years must be done so in a way that takes account of the potential future impact of climate change.

“Infrastructure assets often have lives of at least 50-100 years so they need to be designed to function long into the future when the climate is projected to be very different," she said.

She was speaking at Blackfriars Station in London, which is under-going extensive reconstruction work, while launching a collection of new reports scoping the work required to adapt the U.K.'s infrastructure to the future impacts of climate change.

“This presents great opportunities for British businesses to develop new technologies and processes in engineering, planning and consultancy, ICT-based technologies, renewable energy, investment, and insurance,she added.

Examples of measures that will require action are:

• strengthening power cables to avoid excess wire expansion in hot summers and increase their resilience to extreme weather events
• building bridges higher than currently required to accommodate larger tidal ranges
• surfacing motorways with materials able to withstand hotter temperatures and intense and rainfall
• letting power plants use dry cooling technology that limits their water use
• making rail tracks of stronger materials that prevent buckling in increased temperatures
• strengthening reservoirs to prevent dams bursting after extreme rainfall and covering them in summer to minimise water loss through evaporation
• protecting telecom cables and infrastructure from extreme weather events that can cut off communication, for example by burying them.

The reports, which look in detail at the energy, ICT, transport and water sectors, contain measures for particular sectors:

• owners and operators of infrastructure should include improving climate resilience in the maintenance schedules for their assets, and factor it into the design of new infrastructure
• potential investors should demand more information from companies on the climate risks to their assets and measures taken to reduce them
• professional bodies should ensure their members have the right skills
• engineers should develop new materials, techniques and designs to improve the resilience of infrastructure to severe weather.

There are clear implications for the planning regime. Planning applications for new nationally significant infrastructure must clearly set out how the impacts of climate change in the planning, designing, building, operating, and decommissioning of infrastructure have been considered.

Therefore the government will include adaptation within each National Policy Statement, to set out how applicants should consider the impacts of climate change in their applications.

Government will also later this year produced detailed sector applications of its Principles for Economic Regulation, which will inform the design of regulatory frameworks.

It intends to work with many bodies, such as the Engineering and Interdependencies Group to explore how this work can be taken forward in a practical sense.

Adaptation requirements will also be added to the Green Book as conditions for government procurement so that the government may lead by example.

High-profile examples of this such as Crossrail are to be used to demonstrate how adaptation can be integrated into new infrastructure projects.

Attempts will also be made to influence the investment sector by integrating adaptation into the decision-making of the proposed Green Investment Bank.

There are still major gaps in the evidence base which determines what measures actually work in different situations. Therefore the government will work with industry partners to improve this.

Other essential future work includes a specific study on how climate change might affect the waste infrastructure and this will input into the UK's first Adaptation Programme, and Defra's Waste Infrastructure Delivery Programme.

The same applies to consideration of how the international impacts of climate change might affect the infrastructure in this country, for example through interruption of supply chains.

Working out how to protect Britain from extreme weather events used to be the province of the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP), but this is one of the arms length bodies which is being wound down. These reports are the result of collaboration and consultation with a great many organisations.

From September 2011, the Environment Agency will be responsible for delivering Defra’s work on adaptation and some of UKCIP’s activities working on Defra’s behalf with organisations to assist them in adapting to unavoidable climate change will transfer to the Environment Agency. But UKCIP will continue to perform a similar function, but independently as a part of Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute.