ICE submission to the National Resilience Committee’s inquiry on national resilience

The House of Lords Committee on National Resilience is exploring the UK’s preparedness and resilience to a range of threats, including climate change.

Its focus includes how to achieve a whole of society approach to resilience, the interconnectedness of risks across different sectors, countries and timeframes, and how to address strategic gaps.

The ICE’s submission focuses on climate risks to the UK’s infrastructure and makes the following key points:

• Infrastructure is an interconnected ‘system of systems’ which faces increasingly complex, combined threats. This amplifies the risk, cost and impacts of cascading service failures across the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure assets.
• Through climate change, more frequent and extreme weather events will place growing pressure on critical infrastructure systems, many of which were not designed to withstand them, increasing the risk of deterioration and unpredictable failures.
• Responding to the threat of climate change will require a fundamental shift in governance, with clear leadership and coordinated policy that crosses the traditional silos of government departments.
• The UK’s current National Adaptation Programme has been ineffective in driving change. The UK needs clear, actionable resilience and adaptation targets and a well-defined vision for what a resilient UK looks like.
• To incentivise investment in climate resilience and adaptation, the UK government should undertake a national review of the economics of adaptation to understand the value it provides. The ICE will be conducting further work on how to approach this in 2026.
• Other solutions include more and better data collection and sharing on asset resilience and the nature of potential cascading failures; clear, measurable resilience design standards for new and existing infrastructure assets; smarter land use planning; and greater uptake of nature-based solutions.