Changing Work in a Changing Climate
Changing Work in a Changing Climate
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Adaptation to climate change in the UK - New research on implications for employment
Executive summary
Floods, storms and heatwaves in recent years have tested the UK's emergency and local government services, businesses and resilience. These extreme events illustrate the challenges we will face in adapting to climate change. The term 'adaptation' in this context refers to adapting to the effects of the climate change that is already likely to happen as a result of past carbon emissions. While urgent efforts to reduce emissions continue, projections show that a certain amount of climate change in the UK is now inevitable, leading to warmer, wetter winters; hotter, drier summers; and more extreme weather events such as storms and floods.
There is an increasing amount of government and academic activity concerned with climate impacts and adaptation (adaptation is now one of the top priorities for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs). But there has been no significant work to date looking at climate change adaptation and people's working lives. This report is therefore timely and aims to influence policy makers, Government, trade unions, employers and the wider adaptation and climate change policy community.
The research and production of this report was conducted for the TUC in 2008 by environmental consultancy AEA. It included a review of the existing literature, interviews with a number of FTSE 100 companies, an online survey of public sector bodies and a workshop with trade union officials drawn from the TUSDAC group (trade union sustainable development advisory committee), as well as officials with health and safety and skills briefs.
KEY FINDINGS INCLUDE:
The impacts of climate change will be felt across all sectors of the UK economy, bringing risks and potential opportunities. The way in which adaptation measures are designed, planned and implemented will impact on workers and the resilience of the UK economy to climate change.
Organisations will have to adapt on two distinct fronts, engaging with both 'inward' and 'outward' adaptation. The study found that employers are beginning to assess the impacts of climate change and adaptation on their business planning, markets or services ('outward-facing adaptation'), but very few have looked at the impacts on workers and engaged with them to develop adaptation measures that are workable, fair and sustainable in the long term ('inward-facing adaptation').
The two types of adaptation should reinforce each other and in many areas, such as the emergency services, they are clearly interdependent. But employers in the study did not seem to have fully grasped this. Only one employer out of a total of 134 contacted as part of the project had explicitly considered the employment implications of adaptation.
The study exposed a number of issues in danger of being neglected due to this lack of focus on inward-facing adaptation.
On health, safety and dealing with climate hazards at work, issues arose around statutory responsibilities and funding for dealing with extreme events such as floods; and about indoor and outdoor working conditions including workplace temperatures and equipment, clothing and shift patterns to deal with more gradual changes.
Onskills, there is a clear need to invest in training to equip workers for adaptation, both in order to ensure that existing standards, for example in health and safety, are upheld as conditions change, and to help with more technical aspects of people's work, such as assessing risks and opportunities from climate impacts.
There are issues surrounding equity and social justice, both in terms of the unequal distribution of costs and benefits of adaptation in society, and more specifically in some areas of concern such as the lower adaptive capacity of small businesses.
RECOMMENDATIONS
A series of recommendations emerge for Government, employers and trade unions. These include:
Workplace and working practices
New guidance is needed on adapting workplaces to climate change. This could be developed and disseminated by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in partnership with the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
The issue of establishing statutory limits on upper workplace temperatures should be revisited as an urgent priority.
Issues such as dress codes, equipment and shift patterns may need to be renegotiated by employers and trade unions at the local level.
Role of union workplace representatives
An adaptation stream should be built into the TUC's Green Workplaces projects. This has informally started with the development of a section on adaptation in TUC training for environment reps. Further funding will be required to support unions' efforts in this area.
Skills
Further research is needed to develop a clearer understanding of the skills needs posed by adaptation. This could be led by existing partnerships such as the sector skills councils.
Weather-related civil contingency situations
A clear identification is needed from Government of the responsibilities and statutory obligations of relevant parties in all situations, including the fire and rescue and other emergency services. We recognise that some progress has been made here: in response to the Pitt Review of the 2007 floods, the Government has left open the option of statutory underpinning, but the time horizons for this are long and the need for clarity is urgent.
Fair distribution of the costs of adaptation
Government should consider measures to ensure that low-cost housing is available outside high-risk flooding zones and that insurance is available to low-income households.
Further efforts to engage with small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are needed, given the lower adaptive capacity and higher vulnerability of small employers. The UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) could develop its existing work in this area with support from Government.
The TUC strongly believes all of this should take place under the umbrella of 'just transition'. This concept has underpinned union work on climate change mitigation but can be equally applied to adaptation, where it means fairly distributing the costs and benefits of adaptation measures, planning ahead, supporting those affected and genuinely involving workers in decision-making.
Download the full report (PDF)
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