The Point of No Return

A mild morning, as almost all these winter mornings have been. A wonderful burst of canary yellow crocuses are in bloom outside. The icecaps are on the radio again - not doing too well, dripping away. "UK plans to cut CO2 doomed to fail," reads the Guardian's front page. What, I wonder, is the back-up plan? Just in case, you know, we don't all switch to low-energy lightbulbs in time.

To the phone. The Cabinet Office, who are in charge of Civil Contingencies, direct me firmly to Defra: "All I can say is that Defra is the contact for that, Defra are in the lead in terms of developing policy related to climate change." Me: "But shouldn't the Civil Contingency department be involved, too?" They send me a polite email suggesting that the UK Resilience website - the government's information service for emergency planners - might be useful.

The Home Office refer me to Defra. The Foreign Office, questioned about plans to deal with high levels of immigration or population movement, are thoughtful, but not particularly helpful. They point out that "basically it's difficult to say without having specific scenarios. In the case of a national disaster overseas, the Cabinet Office would oversee with probably a lot of liaison with the FCO ... it's so difficult to talk about hypothetical situations."

In the meantime Defra have also got in touch. "No, there is no contingency plan. Firstly, we are working on mitigating climate change so that we don't have dangerous climate change. Secondly, we're setting up an Adaptation Policy Framework, to make sure that all departments are adapting to the effects of climate change that are already in the system." Not contingency, then, but adaptation. The framework "will be ready in October or November", I'm assured. "It's a Defra-led policy which will basically co-ordinate government action on adaptation across all departments. We'll be recommending, for example, that every department has a minister in charge of adaptation."

Suddenly mitigation - trying to curb carbon emissions - has become something of a vote-winner, with politicians and businessmen falling over themselves to persuade us that they, and not their rivals, are the greener, cleaner option. In the meantime, adaptation is the sort of 'er indoors of the arrangement. Behind the scenes a surprising amount of work has been going on to prepare the country for climate change in a way which indicates that many people see it all as kind of inevitable.

In 2004, for example, the Environment Agency ran Exercise Triton, where 60 different organisations, 1,000 people, played out a climate change-driven scenario where high winds and waters hit England's east coast. Meanwhile, the Civil Contingencies Secretariat has been churning out pamphlets with evacuation and shelter procedures in case of flooding caused by global warming, as well as generating entire protocols for the handling of all kinds of Major Water Incidents. The Civil Contingency Act 2004 gave the cabinet emergency powers to be used in the case of war, terrorism, damage to human welfare, or damage to the environment. The construction industry, the water industry and the insurance industry have been making plans for some time. At Water UK, for example, they believe the industry will need new reservoirs to cope with higher demand in the dry summers.

Adaptation and mitigation make uneasy bedfellows: it is difficult to think simultaneously "We must stop this", and "We must prepare for this". Some say contemplating adaptation makes them think harder about how to stop it all, but it is at the same time no surprise if the government prefers to conduct its preparations beneath the radar, to avoid confusing a public who are only just getting the hang of turning the lights off.

It's hard not to feel a flicker of worry that the government is perhaps too resigned to climate change. Depressingly, I noticed that the Defra flood management policy allows for an annual 4.5mm rise in sea levels due to climate change - a figure which, it turns out, dates all the way back to the Ministry for Agriculture in 1990.

Imagine if mitigation had been as glamorous 17 years ago as it is today; if Labour's promises to deliver properly integrated transport had been realised; if serious investment had been made in renewable energy. Perhaps then we wouldn't need this raft of "adaptation" policies. If only we had fought a proper battle against rising carbon emissions, we might not be left with a sense that we are making all the right noises while quietly preparing for an appalling future.