Including Adaptation in your Green Plan
Including Adaptation in your Green Plan – Guidance for NHS Organisations Summary This article describes how, as an NHS organisation, you can include climate change adaptation in your Green Plan. A downloadable Adaptation Plan Template is available here and is an example of how you can lay out a climate change risk assessment and adaptation plan, with reference to a range of tools you can use (also available through WeAdapt under the tag #NHSadapts ) to produce these. Introduction - how do I write an adaptation plan? Whilst the third iteration of the Government’s National Adaptation Programme, published in July 2023, does include some mention of adapting the NHS including asking you to summarise your adaptation plans in the Green Plan, as of summer 2024 there is little guidance specifically on how the NHS should carry out climate change risk assessments or produce an adaptation plan, or what this should look like. Whilst not produced by the NHS, a not-for-profit in the West Midlands has produced an open- source tool for building resilience to Climate Change into health care systems, with a focus on the NHS in England. The tool, called Adapt to Survive , was produced by Sustainability West Midlands in collaboration with the Environment Agency and can be accessed for free online here. For what an Adaptation Plan should actually look like, Sustainability West Midlands have now produced a Climate Change Adaptation Plan Template which is free, open-source, and can be downloaded from the resource section in this Article. This was produced as part of a project in partnership with Sniffer, NHSE North West, NHSE North East and Yorkshire, and NHS Greater Manchester. To learn more about this project, and to access the other resources produced please search for the tag #NHSadapts on the weadapt website. The Adaptation Plan Template includes references to Adapt to Survive, a Climate Adaptation Framework (also produced as part of the aforementioned project), and other free online resources on climate change and adaptation. The template also touches on how to include adaptation in your Green Plan, but this document expands on this, providing further detail on the purpose of the Green Plan, what you could include on adaptation, and suggestions on how to do this. Please note: The following advice is recommendations produced by SWM and Sniffer, fed into by partners within the NHS. Whilst it refers specifically to guidance from NHSE and makes an effort to elaborate on or further explain this, it is not official NHSE guidance or regulation. You should ensure that you are informed of the specific regulatory expectations of you and your organisation before submitting plans.
Authors: Sustainability West Midlands, Sniffer Partners: NHSE North East & Yorkshire, NHSE North West, NHS Greater Manchester
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