Climate change quango to spend £8m on latest report
The Government's official climate change adviser is to spend £8.2m on a report assessing the risks of global warming to the UK – roughly five times the cost of the previous study.
The Climate Change Committee said the significant funding uplift was needed because of the growing complexity of the task.
The quango, which advises ministers on how to prepare for global warming, spent £1.8m on its last such report, which ran to 142 pages. The funding uplift this time around means a similar length report would cost more than £50,000 per page.
Andrew Bowie, Conservative shadow energy spokesman, said the scale of spending was 'absurd'.
He said: 'As Kemi Badenoch and I have been warning, the costs of Ed Miliband's net zero by 2050 zealotry is far too high for the British public – and the taxpayer should not be forced to shell out millions of pounds because Labour are too afraid to admit that.'
Richard Tice, Reform's energy spokesman, said: 'It's unbelievable that almost £10m will be wasted on the most expensive net zero report ever.
'It will merely sit on the shelf gathering dust full of self-congratulatory comments whilst ignoring the critical issue which is that net zero is driving up electricity prices and destroying industrial jobs.'
Supporters say the cost, while extremely high for a government report, is small compared to the potential damage from global warming and still represents good value.
Shaun Spiers, chief executive of the Green Alliance, an umbrella group for the UK's leading environmental organisations, said: 'The development of the next climate change risk assessment will be crucial to business and industry understanding how to adapt effectively to climate impacts.
'So the cost of this assessment may seem high, but it's tiny compared with the cost of failing to tackle and adapt to climate change. The impacts of climate change are already being felt and they will only intensify in the coming years.'
The Climate Change Committee's assessments, which are published every five years, aim to quantify the risk from rising temperatures caused by humanity's greenhouse emissions, and recommend policies to mitigate them.
It looks at the growing risks from flooding, rainfall, heat waves, sea level rise and many more factors. The last such study, which was published in 2021 when the Conservatives were in power, warned: 'Climate change has arrived. The world is now experiencing the dangerous impacts of a rapidly heating climate.
'Further warming is inevitable … Only by preparing for the coming changes can the UK protect its people, its economy and its natural environment.'
That report came at a time of cross-party political consensus on climate change and won general support.
Since then, however, the consensus for achieving net zero by 2050 has collapsed with the Conservatives saying it is unfeasible and Reform rejecting it completely.
It means the Climate Change Committee's report and its policy suggestions will be politically controversial, making ministers keen to ensure all scientific statements are backed by strong supporting evidence.
A Climate Change Committee spokesman said the report had been commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) which had also set the budget.
They said: 'The money is spent largely on research, commissioning scientific and technical analysis on adaptation and assessing climate risks and opportunities to the UK.
'In terms of the changed cost, this is because Defra commissioned us to do a different set of work this time.'
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