Watching a bit of Channel 4 News a few minutes ago made me really feel for those poor families who are still flooded out of their homes. Thankfully no-one local to me is impacted, but it does again show that we can be very under prepared as a nation for some of these natural tragedies. And if climate change continues to bring more of this dramatic weather interspersed with long dry spells then investment in our physical infrastructure and preparations for crises needs to increase.
While some of that is an issue for government - most will be for the private sector; households and businesses. For that to happen I feel that the media coverage of environmental issues needs to change, from being purely focused on encouraging us all to act altruistically for the sake of the planet and future generations, by recycling and using less energy, to also bringing home that we may need to prepare to make changes to our homes and the way we live to cope with the climate change that is already happening.
This was brought home to me at a breakfast briefing I attended a couple of weeks back, where one of the speakers, an Oxford Professor, made it very clear that the next thirty years of climate change has already been determined one way or another, there is nothing we can do to reverse it and we need to react now to the challenges that will bring or face the consequences of doing nothing.
