Climate Ready South East Scotland is undertaking an assessment of climate change risks and opportunities for the region as a whole and needs a complete an evidence base as possible for this. Much of the data surrounding vulnerability, exposure, observed impacts, assets, planned investment and development within the region is held by external organisations. The project is gathering this evidence in two ways:
- Formal evidence – including formal climate risk and opportunity assessments undertaken by organisations, sectors or communities and data on impacts and vulnerability. This formal call for evidence closed on Friday 27 September with over 500 sources of evidence have been received – thank you! The project team have carefully catalogued these into a regional evidence log and are now analysing this to create risk descriptions to be scored in the risk assessment workshops in December 2024.
- Lived experience and pictorial evidence qualitative evidence of how extreme weather, climate change and coastal change have affected individuals, communities and places in the region are being gathered via the project Story Map. The story map will continue to gather evidence through spring 2025.
I didn’t submit my formal evidence before the deadline: is it too late?
If you hold information which you think is important and has not been submitted to the project, please contact us. As the project team collates the regional evidence log, we may be in touch with those who submitted information for clarification, or with those who may hold information useful to the assessment to ask them if we could have sight of this.
We are also having dedicated evidence gathering sessions for sectors working with some of the region’s most vulnerable groups in recognition that these groups may have least opportunity to engage with the project.
If you work in public health or health and social care, please share your insights at our online workshop on 19 November 2024. Sign up here (you don’t need to be a climate change expert to attend).
If you work in social housing, please share your insights at our online workshop on 21 November 2024. Sign up here (again no previous knowledge of climate change is needed).
How do I know if the information my organisation holds would be useful to the climate risk and opportunity assessment?
To assess the risks and opportunity that climate change impacts could have on the region, we need to understand
- how and where the region is vulnerable (this might include costs / cascading impacts arising from weather events today, as well as risk assessments considering climate change projections),
- how the region and its assets, infrastructure and land use might develop between now and 2080,
- and action that is already being taken (or is being planned) to respond to climate impacts, or which could have an impact on underlying exposure or vulnerability to climate risks.
Evidence that will help our understanding of these issues could take many forms such as climate risk assessments, public bodies climate change duties reporting, data about how previous extreme weather events have impacted your assets and organisation, existing resilience plans, and plans for future investment in the region (this could be asset upgrades, land management plans, planned development). It may or may not be available in the public domain. It could be documents, maps, photographs and GIS data layers.
If you are not sure if we already have the information or if you are not sure if the data you hold will help the assessment, please get in touch on the email button below.
Handling of confidential information
In some situations, we appreciate it may not be possible for the project team to directly access information held by partners for reasons of confidentiality and commercial sensitivity. In these cases, organisations will be asked to complete a copy of the draft risk and opportunity registers with their own organisation’s view on the risks and associated evidence they draw on to support their conclusions. Please email climatereadyses@sniffer.org.uk if you would like to submit your information this way.
