Frontier, along with Paul Watkiss Associates, were commissioned by The Climate Change Committee (CCC) to produce an assessment of barriers that are preventing investment in climate change adaptation in the UK.

The availability of finance is a significant constraint to measures designed to adapt to climate change. Adaptation actions such as flood prevention, building designs, ecosystem protection often do not have future revenue streams that are as reliable as those for mitigating activities such as low carbon energy, electric vehicles etc. That makes financing much harder.

The report, published today, presents the findings of a rapid literature review, a set of case studies to provide context specific assessments of barriers to investment and how they have been overcome, and a set of related recommendations to the Committee on how these barriers might be removed.

The case studies suggest a large number of elements within the current framework that work well, like: improving communication between stakeholders, increased development of projects that are specific to local circumstances, a flexible approach to developing projects and engaging stakeholders, and increasing learning from each other.  

A number barriers remain to be addressed:  improving information about the effectiveness of adaptation measures, lack of skills in developing financeable adaption projects, regulatory hurdles and the difficulty establishing reliable revenue streams linked to adaptation measures.

The report makes a number of recommendation to overcome those barriers which feed into the CCC’s wider adaptation work programme and in particular ongoing work around what policy actions could deliver the necessary investment in adaptation and indicators of progress on adaptation.

Please click here to read the full report.

For more information, please contact media@frontier-economics.com or call +44 (0) 20 7031 7000.