A cold floodwater of reality

Happy New Year.

Well, try anyway – we could do with a little happiness. But it won’t be secured by running away from some of the major challenges and threats that face us, for these are dangerous times.

Many people are comparing the 2020s to the 1930s but, while that decade saw the rise of dangerous fascist dictators, we’re now seeing the rise of dangerous fascist dictators – and climate change.

And today, just as in the 1930s, governments across the spectrum are focusing on our pressing economic problems and trying to ignore wider threats. Yes, our economy is weak after decades of mismanagement by politicians of all political stripes, but no, a further dose of nasty neoliberal medicine isn’t the answer.

Putting an inflexible lawyer and a central banker in 10 and 11 Downing Street was probably not a very good idea, given previous experiences. They tend not to appreciate the wider picture and to believe what lobbyists tell them about things. That’s done further damage to the planning system after the 20 year onslaught by successive govenments and now we have an even more disastrous new planning policy for England, focused more intensely on 1980s growth fantasies in general, and housing growth fantasies in particular.

Environmental and economic regulation look like following planning down the toilet. Floreat Tufton Street.

But really, is there any trace of reality whatsoever in a 370,000 homes annual building target? Is it wise to expand airports and build motorways as climate change bites hard? Is it responsible to plan massive housing sprawl on food-producing farmland, on the land which recharges aquifers, at locations at which most people must use cars and where nature will be impacted or destroyed despite fantasies about biodiversity net gain?

Most topically perhaps, isn’t it time we stopped building on open land which provides a big buffer against flooding? If there were just one reason for flushing the latest NPPF down the toilet (assuming there’s still the water to do so), it’s the rapidly gathering challenges to our ageing and inadequate drainage and flood-control systems.

As we speak, yet another large part of the country is cleaning up after floods after a winter which has seen repeated named and unnamed storms dumping unprecedented levels of rainfall on old drainage systems further stressed by soil sealing and urban sprawl.

Perhaps one day we could have a geographer, or at least a hydrologist, in Downing Street?

For this is going to get much worse. Climate extremes are intensifying rapidly, and with the world at large failing to tackle greenhouse gas emissions – you ain’t seen nothing yet. Unfortunately, you ain’t seen successive governments doing anything much about it either.

So let’s pose a challenge for government here. Instead of promoting urban sprawl, which will exacerbate the fast growing flooding challenge, why not start seriously planning for it and the investment in the infrastructure that’s needed?

And no, just dumping lots of solar farms on our farmland isn’t the answer to climate change, for we need a wider approach to converting our power systems to non-fossil, including tidal power. But mitigation is anyway only half the battle; the other half is adaptation.

There’s a massive role for the derided planning system to play here – preparing our country for a much-changed world, one in which flooding is a massive threat, sea-level-rise inundates coastal and estuarine communities, food imports are hampered by international conflict, water supplies run short in much of the country and nature is being destroyed.

At the forefront of pressing for these changes must be our national environmental bodies. All of them do great work in their fields but, as we’ve argued for nearly two decades now, they need to work together to push for the big change to the genuinely sustainable development we need.

The Nuclear Doomsday Clock may currently be set at 90 seconds to midnight and there’s little sign of it retreating. But we surely need to pay heed to an Environmental Doomsday Clock which is simply ticking towards midnight, with no pause in sight?

So let 2025 be the year when environmental bodies come together to press for resilient planning – right across the spectrum of policy. It’s time that fantasies about 1980s economic growth were washed away with the flood waters.

It’s reality time.

Jon Reeds