This morning’s the i newspaper had a piece by Emily Beament: “UK is urged to prepare for weather extremes.” I agreed with every word. But it had nothing new (not her fault). It’s the same message we’ve been hearing for years, and yet, nothing seems to be changing.
In 2016, almost TEN years ago, when I’d just founded The Wine and Climate Change Institute and was an Associate with the Global Climate Adaptation Partnership, I attended the 1.5 Degrees Conference at Keble College, Oxford. I was there to discuss the feasibility of freshwater irrigation on a luxury crop like wine, and how, because viticulture is swathed in historical allegories, it has been protected from scrutiny in discussions of water competition.
The conference, “1.5 Degrees: Meeting the Challenges of the Paris Agreement” , was focused on “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.” That was considered an ambitious (even impossible) mitigation goal.
It was the first time I’d heard the term “geoengineering.” I remember the moment vividly: a heated argument erupted in the middle of a presentation. Emotions ran high that week. We were arguing about whether to tinker with the planet’s thermostat rather than address the underlying problem of how we live and consume.
Today, the UK is already living with the consequences at 1.4℃: prolonged droughts, failed harvests, flash floods, and crumbling infrastructure not built for these new extremes (4℃ is coming). Yet we still pretend that “preparation” is a plan.
We urgently need to do three things:
Water security: more reservoirs, promote rainwater harvesting, look at recycled grey water, and redesign our landscapes to store, not shed, water. Our annual rainfall is about too much or too little at the wrong time during the growing season. The UK only irrigates 4% of its farmland and that is for fruit/field vegetables, potatoes, etc. The cereal crops are dry-farmed naturally-irrigation or RWH is considered too expensive to use on them.
Crop adaptation & “re-arrange” where we grow: transition toward varieties that can survive with less water and higher temperatures. We don't want to have to rely on irrigation. The “golden triangle” of British grain (East Anglia, Lincolnshire, and Kent) is under drought stress, while the wetter west (Wales, Scotland, Cumbria) has the rain but not always the right soils or infrastructure for cereal farming.
Soil regeneration: rebuild our soils as living sponges that hold moisture, carbon, and biodiversity. Healthy soil is our first line of defence against both drought and flood. It’s passive rainwater harvesting, in fact.
These are the basic principles of resilience. Yet we seem to have lost the will to act on them. Back in 2016, the talk of “geoengineering” (in the strict definition/scientific policy sense) felt like science fiction to me - a desperate “Plan B” of a world unwilling to change. Terrifying. We have to first rebuild how we use land and manage water. Climate adaptation is about redesigning the system before it breaks.
