Consultation on the Fourth Round of the Climate Adaptation Reporting Power

Overview

The Climate Change Act 2008 enables the Government to require infrastructure providers and bodies with functions ‘of a public nature’ to provide reports on how they manage climate risk, although this power has only been used to make mandatory directions in the first of the three previous rounds. Reports are expected to cover the following areas:

• the current and future projected impacts of climate change on their organisation; 
• proposals for adapting to climate change; and,
• an assessment of progress towards implementing the policies and proposals set out in previous reports. 

This is known as the Adaptation Reporting Power (ARP). The ARP was introduced to help ensure reporting organisations are taking appropriate action to adapt to climate change. It helps to do this both directly, through engaging organisations in reporting, and indirectly, through raising awareness, building capacity in organisations, and making examples of good practice publicly available. 

Under the Climate Change Act 2008’s five-yearly cycle, the government is legally obliged to consult on the proposals in the ARP4 strategy. The strategy is required to be laid in Parliament no later than the laying of National Adaptation Programme (NAP3) due in 2023

In particular, we are consulting on the following considerations: 

• truncating the reporting window so that this and future rounds align with the timetable for the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment, while streamlining and standardising the requirement on existing reporting organisations;
• whether or not the process should remain voluntary or be made mandatory;
• widening the scope to include local authority functions, additional health and social care organisations, organisations with a role in food security, and others;
• providing more guidance on issues such as risk interdependencies; and,
• reviewing the existing approach to sectoral overview reporting while striking the right balance between proportionality and climate risk insights from the sectors in question.

The consultation document (PDF) with full detail of all proposals for the ARP4 strategy is linked below. 

What happens next

When this consultation ends, we will summarise the responses and place this summary on our website at: http://www.gov.uk/defra. This summary will include a list of organisations that responded but not personal names, addresses or other contact details.

We will use the consultation responses to inform the final published strategy for the fourth round of adaptation reporting, to be published in 2023.