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Following a review, the Environment Agency has implemented new requirements for all Environmental Permit holders.  You will now need to integrate climate change adaptation planning into your management system and complete a Climate Change Adaptation Risk Assessment by 1st April 2024.

To prepare your site for Climate Change in your Management System, all sites with an Environmental Permit are required to have a written Environmental Management System in place to minimise risks of pollution caused by the permitted activities. The Environment Agency provides guidance on the requirements of these types of management systems.  One of the latest requirements is to undertake an assessment to understand if a changing climate could affect your operations and your ongoing ability to comply with your permit in the future.

The types of events to be considered under the Climate Change Risk Assessment are changes to site operations through:

• Globally rising sea levels.
• Higher average temperatures across all seasons.
• Increased frequency and intensity of heat waves, excessively hot days and wildfires.
• Changes in rainfall patterns and rain intensity/duration.
• Increased frequency of extreme weather such as storms.

When considering the changes above, the operational site needs to plan appropriately and implement changes, if and when required, to try and reduce future impacts. Reviews and revisions should be made in response to new information and plans should include ways to test the effectiveness of the actions, policies, procedures and assessments.

So what is required under these changes and when do they need to be implemented?

Following an update to guidance in April 2023 the Environment Agency released information on when and what Environmental Permit holders will need to do to meet the requirements for climate adaptation planning.

What you need to do falls into two specific paths, which are detailed below and purely relate to when your permit was issued.

If your Environmental Permit was issued on or after 1st April 2023, under the guidance you need to integrate climate change adaptation planning into your Environmental Management System.

Conversely, if your Environmental Permit was issued before the 1st April 2023  and although you should already have considered climate change impacts on your operations, you need to complete a Climate Change Adaptation Risk Assessment by 1st April 2024.