The news this week has been full of official report publications that confirm what has long been shouted about by the environmental lobby; whether you want to admit that we have hastened it along or not, climate change is happening.

Predictions, based on 400 variations of the model developed by the Hadley centre (part of the Met Office) and now embedded into the UK Climate Projections 2009 report (UKCP09), show that, in the South East, we are heading for average temperatures of +/- 40° C over the next 25-45 years.

Cornwall is already becoming a better place to establish successful vineyards than to grow carrots, the Thames is set to rise by 36 cms, 1,000’s of homes are disappearing every year on the east coast of the UK due to coastal erosion, summer rainfall will decrease by about 20% in the south of England and in Yorkshire and Humberside by the middle of the century, while Scotland and the north-west of England will see winter rainfall increase by a similar amount. Environment Secretary Hilary Benn warned that some climate change is now inevitable because of the greenhouse gases that have already been emitted into the atmosphere and ministers were seen examining the Thames barrier in a week when they were instructed to prepare a climate recovery plan to be submitted in the Spring of 2010.

So should we panic? Of course not; forewarned is forearmed, but there are really only two courses of action that business can take (since ‘do nothing’ is not an option, especially in the City… unless you’re planning on growing gills).

Your first business plan might be to do nothing about your level of emissions (despite the fact that the evidence is pretty clear that burning carbon directly relates to the degree that you burn profit) and prepare for migration. If you are located in London or Manchester, you will need to start planning on migrating to areas where you won’t need a riverboat to reach the office… and don’t forget your clients and customers. Whatever market you are in, your client base will be migrating and potentially changing not only geography but also demography – that’s something that is harder to plan for but with more than three decades advance warning, you’ll likely come up with something.

Your second business plan might (and should) be to act now to reduce, measurably and significantly, your use, abuse and wastage of carbon-emitting resources in order to mitigate the effects of climate change and, by association, the requirement to migrate your business (in every sense of the word). With or without our ‘input’, there will be climate change – the planet’s history teaches us that much – but the acceleration of that change can be slowed if we act now.

In essence, we have to stop talking about it and start doing something about it; something we are still not too good at in this country otherwise why would our last wind turbine manufacturer in the UK have finally gone to the wall this year (China is now the largest manufacturer of wind turbines in the world)? This holds true for politicians as much as it does to the commercial sector… and taxing us into submission won’t cut it.

The Climate Conference in Copenhagen runs from 6th to the 18th December of this year. Let’s hope it delivers more than all the other summits and conferences that have come to naught so far; and whatever it does, or does not, deliver, look at your organisation now and just do something. The time for talk is definitely over.

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