Delivering organisational adaptation through legislative mechanisms: Evidence from the Adaptation Reporting Power (Climate Change Act 2008)

There is increasing recognition that organisations, particularly in key infrastructure sectors, are potentially vulnerable to climate change and extreme weather events, and require organisational responses to ensure they are resilient and adaptive. However, detailed evidence of how adaptation is facilitated, implemented and reported, particularly through legislative mechanisms is lacking. The United Kingdom Climate Change Act (2008), introduced the Adaptation Reporting Power, enabling the Government to direct so-called reporting authorities to report their climate change risks and adaptation plans. We describe the authors' unique role and experience supporting the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) during the Adaptation Reporting Power's first round. An evaluation framework, used to review the adaptation reports, is presented alongside evidence on how the process provides new insights into adaptation activities and triggered organisational change in 78% of reporting authorities, including the embedding of climate risk and adaptation issues. The role of legislative mechanisms and risk-based approaches in driving and delivering adaptation is discussed alongside future research needs, including the development of organisational maturity models to determine resilient and well adapting organisations. The Adaptation Reporting Power process provides a basis for similar initiatives in other countries, although a clear engagement strategy to ensure buy-in to the process and research on its long-term legacy, including the potential merits of voluntary approaches, is required.

Integrating horizon scanning and strategic risk prioritisation using a weight of evidence framework to inform policy decisions

Poor connection between data on emerging issues and credible policy decisions continues to challenge governments, and is only likely to grow as demands on time and resources increase. Here we summarise recent efforts to integrate horizon scanning and risk prioritisation approaches to better connect emerging issues to the political discourse on environmental and food-related issues. Our categorisation of insights including potential future risks and opportunities to inform policy discussions has emerged from a structured three-year programme of horizon scanning for a UK pan-governmental futures partnership led by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Our efforts to integrate horizon scanning and risk prioritisation, utilising a qualitative weight of evidence framework, has created a systematic process for identifying all signals of potential future change with significant impact for the strategic mission and underlying values of policy actors. Our approach encourages an exploration of factors out of the control of organisations, recognising that resilience depends on the flexibility of management strategies and the preparedness to deal with a variety of unexpected outcomes. We discuss how this approach addresses key cultural and evaluative challenges that policy actors have had in embedding horizon scanning in evidence-based policy processes, and suggest further developments to build confidence in the use of horizon scanning for strategic planning.

Regulators as agents: modelling personality and power as evidence is brokered to support decisions on environmental risk

Complex regulatory decisions about risk rely on the brokering of evidence between providers and recipients, and involve personality and power relationships that influence the confidence that recipients may place in the sufficiency of evidence and, therefore, the decision outcome. We explore these relationships in an agent-based model; drawing on concepts from environmental risk science, decision psychology and computer simulation. A two-agent model that accounts for the sufficiency of evidence is applied to decisions about salt intake, animal carcass disposal and radioactive waste. A dynamic version of the model assigned personality traits to agents, to explore their receptivity to evidence. Agents with 'aggressor' personality sets were most able to imbue fellow agents with enhanced receptivity (with 'avoider' personality sets less so) and clear confidence in the sufficiency of evidence. In a dynamic version of the model, when both recipient and provider were assigned the 'aggressor' personality set, this resulted in 10 successful evidence submissions in 71 days, compared with 96 days when both agents were assigned the 'avoider' personality set. These insights suggest implications for improving the efficiency and quality of regulatory decision making by understanding the role of personality and power.

Scientific commentary: Strategic analysis of environmental policy risks--heat maps, risk futures and the character of environmental harm

We summarise our recent efforts on the policy-level risk appraisal of environmental risks. These have necessitated working closely with policy teams and a requirement to maintain crisp and accessible messages for policy audiences. Our comparative analysis uses heat maps, supplemented with risk narratives, and employs the multidimensional character of risks to inform debates on the management of current residual risk and future threats. The policy research and ensuing analysis raises core issues about how comparative risk analyses are used by policy audiences, their validation and future developments that are discussed in the commentary below.

Better by design: rethinking interventions for better environmental regulation

Better regulation seeks to extend existing policy and regulatory outcomes at less burden for the actors involved. No single intervention will deliver all environmental outcomes. There is a paucity of evidence on what works why, when and with whom. We examine how a sample (n=33) of policy makers select policy and regulatory instruments, through a case study of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), UK. Policy makers have a wide range of instruments at their disposal and are seeking ways to harness the influence of non-governmental resources to encourage good environmental behaviour. The relevance of each influence varies as risk and industry characteristics vary between policy areas. A recent typology of policy and regulatory instruments has been refined. Direct regulation is considered necessary in many areas, to reduce environmental risks with confidence and to tackle poor environmental performance. Co-regulatory approaches may provide important advantages to help accommodate uncertainty for emerging policy problems, providing a mechanism to develop trusted evidence and to refine objectives as problems are better understood.

Electrohydrodynamic deposition of nanostructured lead zirconate titanate

The deposition of a propanol-based lead zirconate titanate (PZT) sol using electrohydrodynamic atomization (EHDA) in the stable cone-jet mode was investigated. The droplets generated were deposited onto a copper substrate as a film, which was investigated using X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy. The PZT film was shown to contain uniform nano-particles of PZT, which maintained their shape on sintering (650 degrees C, 1 hour) while forming the perovskite phase of PZT.