Mitigate and adapt to climate change impact

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 and more extreme weather events are already having an impact.

We are working to ensure the service we deliver today can continue into the future, particularly as the population of our region is growing rapidly. We are embedding our response to the challenges of climate change into our decision-making processes across the business, ensuring it is integrated into everything we do.

Managing the impacts of climate change

The illustration below depicts the impact of climate change on the regions rainfall, rivers, river water quality and nature reserves. The illustration shows the company’s actions in addressing these impacts.

Preparing our assets

We are ensuring our infrastructure has the resilience to cope with the changing climate by assessing, for example, the vulnerability of our critical assets, sites and infrastructure to potential changes in flood risk and sea-level rise. We have also been working closely with the Meteorological Office to understand how future changes in rainfall might affect our sewer design standards.

Clever technology means that seven of our wastewater treatment sites are already working on renewable energy from the gas that’s a by-product of sewage treatment and we’re converting five more of ours sites by 2015.

Switching on our colleagues

Building on our think energy and why travel campaigns, we have recently launched our Drop CO2 project which is switching on our colleagues to find even more ways to cut our energy and carbon at offices, sites and by reducing the miles we travel.

To find out more on what we are doing to mitigate and adapt to climate change, visit the climate change pages under our Environment section.