There is something rather useful about sitting in an old shed beside a river. You notice things. You notice when the seasons don’t quite behave as they used to, when the river is unusually low, when the garden is baked hard for weeks and then suddenly gets a month’s worth of rain in an afternoon. You notice the little changes because you’ve spent years looking at the same view, and increasingly that view is telling us something: the climate we built our homes, farms, roads, drains and energy systems around isn’t necessarily the climate we’ve got anymore.
For most of my working life in renewables, the conversation has been about preventing climate change. Reduce carbon, replace fossil fuels, generate clean electricity and try to stop temperatures rising. All of that remains absolutely essential, but there’s an uncomfortable truth we now need to accept. We should have acted much faster than we did. Governments talked, targets came and went, policies changed with the political weather and we wasted decades arguing about whether things that were already happening were actually happening. Meanwhile the climate carried on changing.
So alongside mitigation, we now need to talk much more seriously about adaptation. Not surrender, and certainly not abandoning the effort to reduce emissions, but recognising that some change is already with us and preparing our homes, communities, infrastructure and food systems for it. Around the world, countries that have traditionally faced particular climatic challenges are already showing us what that can look like.
The Dutch, for example, have spent centuries learning that you don’t beat water simply by building a bigger wall and hoping for the best. Modern Dutch water management increasingly gives rivers space, stores excess water and designs landscapes around the reality that flooding will sometimes happen. In hotter parts of southern Europe, water scarcity is changing irrigation, crop choices and the way towns deal with heat. Australia has had to learn some brutal lessons about drought, water conservation and bushfires, while cities experiencing increasingly dangerous temperatures are planting trees, creating shade and reconsidering the wisdom of covering enormous areas with concrete and tarmac and then wondering why they become ovens in summer.
Britain, by comparison, has had the luxury of a relatively benign climate for a very long time. We designed systems around the assumption that tomorrow would behave broadly like yesterday. Turn on the tap and water comes out, turn on the switch and electricity arrives, the supermarket shelves are full, the drains take the rain away and the seasons arrive roughly when expected. The problem is that those assumptions are becoming rather less reliable, and instead of simply trying to preserve the world we designed in the twentieth century, perhaps we should start designing for the one we’re actually going to live in during the twenty-first.
Oddly enough, some of the answers aren’t particularly new. The ancient Egyptians were harnessing wind to sail along the Nile thousands of years ago. Civilisations used flowing water for mechanical power long before anybody knew what a kilowatt-hour was. People built according to the position of the sun, collected water when it fell and grew food according to the conditions around them. We sometimes talk about renewable energy as though somebody invented it twenty years ago when, in reality, humanity spent thousands of years using renewable energy before we discovered that digging up millions of years’ worth of stored carbon and burning it very quickly was rather convenient.
The technology, of course, has changed beyond recognition, but the basic resources haven’t. The sun still shines, the wind still blows, rivers still flow, tides still rise and fall and there is an extraordinary amount of heat beneath our feet. Solar, wind, tidal, hydro, geothermal and solar thermal aren’t competing answers to the same problem; they are different tools that suit different places. Add batteries, thermal stores and other forms of energy storage and we can increasingly capture energy when nature provides it and use it when we need it. There is also something wonderfully simple about the fact that nobody has ever had to send an army halfway around the world to secure a supply of sunshine.
But adapting to climate change cannot simply mean covering everything in solar panels and carrying on exactly as before. If we really want resilience, we also need to become considerably better at wasting less. Less electricity, less heat, less water, less food and fewer materials. We need buildings that require less energy in the first place, rainwater captured rather than immediately pushed into an overloaded drain, products repaired rather than discarded, and food grown closer to the people eating it wherever that is practical. None of this is particularly glamorous, which may be why politicians prefer announcing enormous projects, but sometimes the boring solutions are the ones that actually work.
There is another part of adaptation that I think we’ve largely forgotten, and that is community in the genuine sense of the word. Not “community” as something printed on the front of a council consultation document, but people knowing their neighbours and towns and villages understanding what resources they have between them. Farmers, householders, businesses, schools, churches, village halls and local trades all have a part to play. A village hall with solar, batteries and efficient cooling could become somewhere elderly and vulnerable residents can go during an extreme heatwave. A school roof can generate electricity where it is being consumed. Neighbours can work together to improve their homes, share knowledge and reduce costs. Farmers can produce food while also managing water, improving biodiversity and generating renewable energy.
I’ve spent nearly twenty years working in renewable energy and for most of that time we’ve sold solar primarily on two things: saving money and saving carbon. Both remain important, but increasingly I think there’s a third reason – resilience. A home generating some of its own electricity, storing some of it and using energy intelligently is less exposed to what happens elsewhere. The same principle works at village, town and national level. Local renewable generation reduces dependence upon imported energy, growing more food locally reduces exposure to disrupted supply chains, saving water makes drought easier to manage and planting trees doesn’t simply capture carbon; it creates shade, slows rainfall, cools streets and provides habitat. The clever solutions are often the ones that solve several problems at the same time.
Perhaps that’s where we’ve gone slightly wrong. Human beings have become extraordinarily good at constructing complicated systems and global supply chains, but we’ve sometimes forgotten that underneath all of them sit four remarkably simple things: energy, water, food and weather. We don’t control any of them quite as completely as we like to imagine.
There are lessons in our own past as well. Our grandparents wasted very little food because food had value. Rainwater was collected because water mattered. Things were repaired because replacing them wasn’t automatically the cheapest or easiest option. Communities shared resources and helped one another partly because there often wasn’t anybody else coming to do it for them. I’m certainly not suggesting everything was better in the old days – it plainly wasn’t – but some of the principles were remarkably sensible. Use what nature gives you, don’t waste what you’ve already got, produce what you reasonably can close to where it’s needed and prepare for the difficult years during the good ones.
We acted too slowly on climate change and no amount of rewriting history will change that. What we can change is what happens next. We can carry on building homes that overheat, throwing perfectly good drinking water down drains, importing things we could produce ourselves and burning fuels transported thousands of miles to provide energy that is falling on our roofs every morning. Or we can start adapting, not through one grand solution but through thousands of sensible ones: generating more renewable energy, storing it, conserving water, growing more food, wasting less, planting more trees and rebuilding genuinely resilient communities.
Sitting here in my 200-year-old shed beside the Great Ouse, none of that strikes me as especially revolutionary. In fact, after several thousand years of human beings learning how to live with the sun, wind, water and the land around them, it sounds remarkably like common sense.