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Objective 7: Managing climate change risk
BU’s Climate Change Risk Register sits within our Energy and Environmental Management System and documents the risks posed to our operations because of climate change. As these risks become more common, it’s vital that we progress mitigation and adaptation measures via our CECAP to further embed an understanding of these risks across BU.
In March 2021 our Head of Operations and Resilience, Shona Nairn Smith, was awarded an honorary fellowship to the EAUC for her work on climate change adaptation and risk management for the risk register.
We have yet to make significant progress to quantify and report the financial costs of the climate and ecological crisis but continue to develop our approach in consultation with organisations such as BCP and Dorset Councils and the EAUC.
I was delighted to accept an EAUC Honorary Fellowship (along with Neil Smith, former BU Sustainability Manager) for our Climate Change Adaptation project. We looked at the business continuity impact of climate change, such as increased risk of flooding, wildfires and heatwaves, and what we could do to reduce the risk of future interruption to our activities and harm to our staff and students, buildings and facilities. I’m looking forward to taking this work forwards, building on the heightened awareness achieved through COP26 and our own CECAP.
Shona Nairn Smith, BU Head of Operations and Resilience/Assistant COO BU Disaster Management Centre
BU’s research also contributes to the management of climate risk internationally and two notable projects were delivered by Bournemouth University Disaster Management Centre (BUDMC) in 2020-21 which contributed to the managing climate risk theme:
Working with the World Bank, the BUDMC delivered several workshops to help preparations for managing hurricane seasons amid Covid-19 and provided access to a Situational Awareness platform for five Caribbean countries to collate real-time data during crises. The project’s final Investment Proposal to the governments and the World Bank outlined twenty recommendations to improve disaster preparedness and response capacity in the region.
The innovative AfriCab project applied Single Points of Failure (SPOF) diagnostics to identify potential and real SPOF that can be ‘resolved’ by African disaster managers, particularly focusing on reducing risk from the increasing severity of annual flooding in Sierra Leone and fires in dumpsites across the Capital of Freetown. AfriCab organised workshops to prepare local disaster managers for flood seasons, including one in the wake of the March 2021 Susan’s Bay Fire Disaster during which 7000 people lost their homes.
