ESPACE 4th Joint International Workshop
Workshop on Action Analysis 8 May 2006
ESPACE 4th Joint International Workshop
Day 1– Analysis of Partner Actions
Hotel Frankenland, Bad Kissingen, Germany
WORKSHOP REPORT
N.B. This Workshop Report provides details of the discussions that took place on Day 1 of the ESPACE Workshop. All presentations and additional documents referred to in the text of this report are available on the website www.espace-project.org
Session 1
Bryan Boult
Good morning and welcome to the 4th ESPACE Workshop.
There are some new faces around the table which I would like to introduce: Tania Stadsbader from RLZZZ, Mark Elliott from WSCC, Elaine Tantram from SCC and
Mike Steel from the Environment Agency.
I would also like to welcome back Reinhard Schmidtke who is now a consultant with LFW.
Today is going to be run by the consultants we have appointed to help us with the end of the project outputs. The work will take place in three phases, as set out in the project plan. The first phase of work is the Analysis of Partner Actions. Acclimatise are the appointed consultants and I would like to ask John and Richenda to introduce themselves before they start their session.
Acclimatise are going to be working very closely with all of us over the next 14 months. The reason for that is because we have now moved into the last phase of the project. It is the most important phase of the project. Until now we have been focussing on the partner actions such as case studies, models, tools, etc. . We are now focussing on the end of the project outcomes.
What we have got to do now is to pull all the work we have been doing together to come up with our results and our recommendations for what spatial planning in Europe is going to have to do to adapt to climate change.
At the moment I know that inside each of us is a little idea of what that might be. The task of John and Richenda is to get us to articulate that, to bring it out from inside ourselves and to develop it together with us. It is not their job to come up with that end answer, because they don’t know what it is, but we do. Their job is to get us to do that work. It is very important for the next 14 months that all of us around the table are really engaged in that and we see that vision. At the end of the day our stakeholders and target audiences are not going to be that interested in the individual case studies and individual pieces of work we have done. What they are very interested in is coming along to the final event to hear about is what we said we were going to do when we started off working on this project together. That is what the whole of the rest of the project is about. So it is a very big step we have taken in this workshop.
I will now hand over to Richenda Connell who will introduce Acclimatise.
Richenda Connell
Good morning everybody. It is great to have met most of you last night, and I look forward to working with the rest of you today and getting to know you all. I am going to start with a short introductory presentation about what we are trying to achieve today.
Briefly, I am going to tell you about Acclimatise, who we are, our role in ESPACE and how we see ourselves working with you. Then we will gradually work through the steps of the workshop during the course of the day.
We call ourselves a specialist risk management company. We are focussed entirely on helping organisations adapt to climate change. We work with the planning community, people with infrastructure and large fixed assets, essentially people who need to be thinking long term on the kinds of decisions where climate change impacts will start to be important. From working with those sectors we also work with the investment community, the insurance community and, increasingly, with law firms who are beginning to see the relevance of climate change to their business and the transactions that they carry out as well.
I will let John introduce himself.
John Firth
It is a great pleasure to be here today. Richenda and I set up this company up about 18 months ago. My background is 28 years in the water industry in the UK, most of that time as a strategic planning manager responsible for all the long term assets and the investment plans of the company. I was responsible for putting together something like £6 billion of investment over a 10 year period.
As well as a background in water management I am actually a chartered town planner as well. So I have a professional interest in this work as I came from both the water side and the spatial planning side as well.
My expertise probably is more in thinking about the risk assessment and management issues, obviously through my water industry background. As a result of that, I have got a lot of experience in things like change planning, financial planning, to think about what are the right sorts of targets and indicators of performance actually are. Most recently, over the last 18 months, we have been looking at what the investment and insurance communities are looking for in terms of climate change.
Richenda Connell
I think that is maybe one of the things that we are quite interested in picking up. Not necessarily today, I am sure a bit of it comes through today, but we are interested in picking up some interactions between what your work is delivering and how you see that relating to the private sector.
In terms of me and where I come from, I am, by training, an atmospheric chemist. I worked as an air pollution consultant for a big environmental consultancy in the UK called ERM for four years, and then about 6½ years ago I joined an organisation called the UK Climate Impacts Programme which the UK partners will know about. UKCIP was set up by the British Government to help the UK prepare for the impacts of climate change. For instance, Mark Goldthorpe is from the South East Climate Change Partnership which is one of the regional partnerships established under the UKCIP umbrella. My role in the UKCIP was to help these partnerships to find a way to help their region to begin to adapt to climate change. I was also overseeing the research programmes that UKCIP was making happen, looking at climate impacts on different sectors.
I also have a very strong interest in risk management. When I was with UKCIP I developed, with the Environment Agency, a framework for managing climate risk which in fact got used in the EA’s ESPACE Decision Testing Tool for the first risk management framework.
Our role in ESPACE is to work closely with all of you, essentially extract all this fantastic information out of you, all these incredible things that you have achieved. Today, obviously, we are making a start on reviewing the actions you have undertaken and to begin to pull out some of the trans-national lessons and findings. Then, as the project progresses, we will be working with you to develop a common trans-national strategy, the guidance and some of the policy. So we will be with you now until the end of the project and we are looking forward to the last year to 18 months of it.
The aim of today’s workshop is to discuss how your work contributes to the development of the trans-national strategy and the guidance and policies. It is really for us, to help us gain a deeper understanding of what you have achieved so far, and maybe for you to point us to some really key outputs that you have produced. I will freely say to you that we haven’t read every single report on the ESPACE website before we came here today. We have read some of them. We tried to pick up some key ones, but what we are hoping is that you will say ‘you really need to read this’. We would be interested in you saying that this is one to focus on.
Then, we have got this notion of what we are calling ‘pieces of the jigsaw’. Is the term jigsaw familiar to everybody? Maybe I could show this next slide. This is pieces of a jigsaw. As Brian said, we want great end of project outputs, the strategy and the guidance. At the moment we don’t know quite what it looks like, we may have some components of the jigsaw, we think we know the colour of the piece of the jigsaw but it is all a bit disconnected and we don’t know quite what it adds up to.
We hope as we progress that we can start to see some more detail emerging, and we think we may start to see a picture beginning to emerge. If we work in this direction we may think our strategy is going to be this beautiful masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, but we are not yet sure and we may discover, as we carry on working on it, that in fact it is a slightly different picture that we are working towards. So we have to keep an open mind at this stage but try to colour in these pieces as we go along to develop the picture. If it is as beautiful as The Girl with the Pearl Earring at the end we will be very pleased.
That is it from me for our short opening presentation. I wanted to know if anyone has any questions at this point about what we are aiming for today.
Hans Weber
Can you give some remarks about the number of staff in your company?
Richenda Connell
We are quire a small company at the moment; we have 4½ members of staff.
If there are no further questions we will go into the first session.
This is where we are going to discuss barriers and risks, whatever they may be, to the delivery of a better adapted spatial planning system. Before we came here we received the spreadsheets you completed quite recently where you were asked to say what your work contributed to the spatial strategy and common guidance etc. We have had a good look through these spreadsheets and we have developed from those a view of the barriers and risks that we see coming out across the different spreadsheets. We have tried to identify common barriers and risks that have come across from all of your work. We would like to discuss this list with you and for you to refine it, clarify it, amend it slightly with us. Then we are going to vote on where you think your work has made the greatest contribution to overcoming these barriers and risks. Then, later in the workshop, we will ask what lessons you have learned, and what that tells us about the common trans-national strategy.
One of the things we are going to do during the course of the day is we have got these pieces of A5 card and these are the “pieces of the jigsaw”. If we think during the course of the day we know what a piece of the jigsaw is – regulation, communication, whatever it may be – then we are going to write it on here and we will stick them up on one of the flipcharts and gather those during the course of the day, so we are trying to capture some of those as we go along. Then, when we get to the end of the day, we will talk about those pieces of the jigsaw in more detail and see how we can begin to fit them together.
On the slides you can see there are two tables with the barriers and risks. We have two slides and there are four of these barriers and risks on each one. We have, maybe, seven minutes per barrier to discuss it and for you to tell us what your work has shown you about this barrier. We have made some crude assumptions about things that belong together, or maybe we have described something in a particular way and you think, actually that is not the way I see this barrier; my work has actually shown it to be more complex than that, or different from that.
So, as I said, we are going to spend around 7 minutes each talking about these different barriers, and John is then going to try and capture in the second column your richer description of what these barriers or risks need.
The first barrier that we have identified is lack of awareness, lack of a sense of urgency or agency for change. This could be maybe with the decision makers, or it could be with the general public. Does anyone have any comments on having those things together?
Doogie Black
Some of the climate change research we have carried out in Hampshire after the workshop we had in February, talks about behaviour change principles and how we can bring about behaviour change which looks at awareness as one ingredient in the process. The sense of urgency is normally an awareness issue but there are processes that get people to act upon that using different ingredients (awareness, agency, association, action, architecture). We have quite a lot of information on that.
Richenda Connell
So you are saying, basically, that awareness is the first step in these four.
Doogie Black
No. Awareness is one of the ingredients in that. What we are saying is that with issues like climate change it can be so overwhelming that a raised level of awareness without any understanding of what to do with that awareness can be quite a negative thing. So it is important to get in the right quantities and the right balance so that awareness can lead to change.
Richenda Connell
So too much awareness without any notion of what to do makes you give up.
Hans Weber
Why did you say that point 1 is level of awareness. I think the first thing is to have the information or the lack of information, and it is a requisite for following awareness.
Richenda Connell
That is a very good point. My apologies, I should have said that we haven’t listed these things in a particular order. So they don’t represent the order that you need information in. But I appreciate what you are saying, that the first thing you need is information. In fact we have a barrier which is on information, which we come onto next. It is the second barrier. It wasn’t meant to be an order that represented a sequence of events.