Climate change

We believe that climate change is the biggest risk to our business over the next 25 years. Changes in rainfall patterns, temperatures and sea levels affect almost every part of our business, increasing the risk of both flooding and water scarcity.

We don’t want to take any chances protecting our customers, assets and the environment from these increased risks so we are working with the best brains around to ensure we fully understand the science of climate change as well as taking action to reduce our impact on the environment and adapt our water and wastewater operations to a changing world.

Working with the best

We have worked closely with the UK Climate Impacts Programme to help them develop the UK Climate Change Projection (UKCP09) scenarios. The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) recognised our work on the UKCP09 scenarios and invited us to give a presentation at the launch of this leading-edge science to help illustrate how business can use this data to respond and prepare for the challenge of climate change.

We have also worked with the Tyndall Centre and Southampton University to model the effects of coastal changes. Ellie Mitchell (Royal Haskoning, University of Southampton) said “Identifying the communities most vulnerable to flooding and coastal erosion, and quantifying those risk, allows Anglian Water to work successfully with others to develop focused adaptation strategies.”

Leading by example

We believe in aiming high. Winning engagement at the highest level is critical to achieving internationally agreed targets on climate change.

As a founding member of the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders’ Group (CLG) for Climate Change, we were at the launch of the CLG’s Copenhagen Communique in July 2009. We were among one of the first businesses to endorse the Communique, which sets out the business case for an ambitious, robust and effective UN framework on climate change.

Our Managing Director, Peter Simpson, and other business leaders from major UK, EU and international companies in the CLG share a commitment to develop new and longer-term policies for tackling climate change.

Our climate change charter

We have written our climate change charter which has been signed by our Managing Director, Peter Simpson and Nick Herbert, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. In the charter we promise to:

• become the most water-efficient region in the UK
• be innovative and develop more sustainable ways of working
• encourage employees and customers to take action on climate change
• embed climate change mitigation and adaptation into decision-making processes