Climate change plaguing UK
Researchers find a dozen landmarks under threat in bid to wake up public
For 129 years, the Corbridge Cricket Club stood peaceably next to the River Tyne, with the occasional batsman hitting the ball out of the park and into the water. Then, in December 2015, the river invaded the cricket club.
Amid torrential winter rain across the UK, Corbridge’s corner of Northumberland in north-east England experienced heavy flooding.
Such extreme weather events are more likely to happen as climate change affects the UK.
“The whole south side of the village was flooded,” said Michael Robinson, the club’s secretary. “The water went through our changing rooms and the pavilion.” The club suffered about £100,000 (Dh460,000) in damages. Some homes remain shut up and uninhabitable. “The environmental agency was strengthening the flood defences,” Mr Robinson said.
“It was just that, in that year, Mother Nature decided she would come over the defences.”
The Corbridge Cricket Club is one of many sites of cultural, historical and natural significance across the UK that are threatened by climate change, according to a newly published report.
Co-authored by the non-profit Climate Coalition and Leeds University’s Priestley International Centre for Climate, the report describes how the UK is already experiencing some of the consequences of climate change. “When you have a weatherrelated effect, you always wonder how much is down to bad luck and how much down to climate change,” said Piers Forster, the director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate.
“Our calculations try to determine this. In the end, some weather events are just the weather, but climate change will be a contributing factor in some, and a dominant factor in a few.”
Based on field studies and media reports, Mr Forster and his colleagues identified a dozen case studies of special places under threat. The Corbridge Cricket Club is one. So is the Mark Addy Pub in Lancashire, which was flooded in December 2015 and remains closed.
On one of the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland, the remains of a 5,000-year-old settlement are in danger because of “increasing frequency of storm events and sea level rise, which contribute to higher rates of coastal erosion”, said Mairi Davies, the climate change manager for Historic Environment Scotland, a government body.
In the Lake District in the north- west of England, the childhood home of the poet William Wordsworth sits at the confluence of two rivers, both liable to flood in a season of extraordinary rain. It has already happened once. In November 2009, 300 millimetres of rainfall in 24 hours completely wrecked the gar- dens. The National Trust, the UK government agency that tends to sites of national significance, spent £500,000 on repairing the damage.
Other threatened sites include the Slimbridge Wetlands in Gloucestershire, home to nearly 200 species of birds; the Birling Gap chalk cliffs in Sussex, endangered by coastal erosion; and the Beckmickle Ing woodlands, not far from the Lake District.
The report intentionally focuses on sites closely associated with British identity, Dr Forster said.
“It was deliberately trying to appeal to a slightly different audience than normal – people who don’t normally consider climate change in their day-today lives.”
He said that traditional methods of raising awareness, such as putting out detailed academic analyses and sounding considered warnings, had failed to convey the magnitude of climate change. “I think the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in the US shows that liberals have not been effective in engaging large sections of society.”
Floods are now an ever-present danger on the horizon, Mr Robinson said. The club repaired the damage to its playing field in time for the beginning of the 2016 cricket season last April. A new clubhouse will open this May, although this one has been built on stilts.
“It’s a metre and a half off the ground, so that even if the river floods again, it’ll be OK,” Mr Robinson said.
“We’re in February, and I’m looking out of my bedroom window and it isn’t cold. The wind has become milder and we get rain rather than snow. “We hope that the December 2015 flood was a sort of once-ina-lifetime thing, a monumental thing. But we know the climate is changing.”
‘ We’re in February, and I’m looking out of my bedroom window and it isn’t cold. The wind has become milder and we get rain rather than snow Michael Robinson the Corbridge Cricket Club secretary