\\CORRECTED REPEAT\\ENVIRONMENT-BRITAIN: Storms Take Climate Change Issues Out Of Seminar Rooms

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Nov 10 2000 (IPS) - It has proverbially rained and rained in England but rain has never taken England by storm as it has this year.

The British are no more talking of bad weather; they speak instead of climate change. The storms of the past few weeks has brought that idea out of the seminar rooms of environmentalists and into British homes.

In one way or another, as environment minister Michael Meacher said, the floods have taught the British more about global warming than a million political speeches could.

As the storms die out the Prime Minister, the deputy Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales are knocking on English doors to warn of the dangers that lie ahead.

This week the Foreign Office opened a new department to talk to other countries about global warming. The new climate diplomacy was launched after a report suggested that Britain will be hit by the new changes harder than southern Europe.

Britain sees new dangers from the seas around it. The sceptred isle is now the threatened island.

“Of course we cannot link one storm to global warming,” a spokesperson for the Department of the Environment told IPS. “But obviously climate change is developing a pattern and the storms have brought home to people that this is happening.”

The Thames barrier has been tested three times already by heavy seas that would have flooded London if unchecked. It will now be strengthened further at heavy expense.

What were quaint rivers through quiet meadows have been heavily sandbagged in scenes that everyone thought belonged to Bangladesh. Global warming itself hit Britain some time back; now the British have woken up to see what’s hit them. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott called the storms a “wake up call” for the British.

Scientists are suddenly being taken seriously. A study by the Jackson Environment Institute of the University of East Anglia has made a projection that southern Europe will get too hot and dry and the north of Europe too cold and wet. The report was widely carried in the media. In the past British newspapers rarely carried such reports.

The alarm has given a new urgency to the climate talks at The Hague next week. The situation “underlines the need to make the forthcoming international negotiations in the Hague a success, working in partnership to achieve reductions in emissions and to develop global and domestic strategies to combat and adapt to climate change,” Prescott said after inspecting flood damage.

Prime Minister Tony Blair said: “we have to take at international level some of the difficult decisions perhaps ducked for too long about some of the issues of climate change.”

Britain is preparing for a 20 per cent rise in the level of the Thames through the century. The tourism industry is worried. “We’ve seen a dip in arrivals through the wet weather,” an official from the British Tourism Authority told IPS. “No one’s ringing the alarm bells yet but obviously we wouldn’t want too much of this sort of thing.”

But within the government and the flood-hit areas the alarm bells are ringing out every day. The property-conscious British have been hit already by a sudden change in property prices in houses along river banks, considered prize locations until just a few weeks back.

Take the town of Shrewsbury on the banks of the Severn. The little river sent a wall of water up to five metres high at places shooting through the town, for the second time in three years. Hundreds of homes were flooded in 1998 and again this year. The average insurance claim per home is around 10,500 US dollars to cover damage.

Now residents are thinking again about staying on in that town because insurance premiums are set to rise and house prices have begun to drop. The pinch of money turned global warming from a concept to a threat.

The Association of British Insurers (ABI) put its hands up. “At the end of the day it is up to individual companies to charge what they consider appropriate for insuring a property,” a spokeswoman for ABI told IPS. “And every insurance cover carries a risk assessment.”

Three years ago proposals for a flood defence were voted out of the local council at Shrewsbury on the ground they would be too ugly. Now this town like many others will keep barricades ready to keep the floods out.

British farmers are now being asked to change their crop cycles to cut down the danger from flooding. Farmers are being asked to go back to planting in the spring so that water can be better absorbed into the ground through fresh furrows.

Scientists at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire say that as traditional treatment like manuring have declined, the soil has begun to develop a hard cap that fails to absorb enough water. In fields, at home, in government offices the unseen threat has come home.