Local Climate Impacts Profile (LCLIP)

A Local Climate Impacts Profile is a simple means to improve the understanding of how current climate and weather events impact on your area.

In order to assess how your area may be effected by future climate change, it is useful to understand how current weather and climate impact on your operations and community.

As a starting point for a Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan, you could consider the production of a Local Climate Impacts Profile (LCLIP) to help identify vulnerability to recent weather and climate events in your area; how these events were dealt with and what costs were involved. The basic approach consists of scanning local media for weather-related news stories and then investigating how these were dealt with by your authorities or other organisations. Not only does an understanding your current vulnerability to climate impacts assist in the assessment of future risks, undertaking an LCLIP can:

• act as a powerful means of raising awareness of the issues amongst members and senior management, particularly if costs can be assigned to local climate impacts.
• A community wide LCLIP can be a useful tool for raising awareness of climate change amongst residents and local businesses.
• By analysing recent impacts you can also develop an understanding of what the critical thresholds for particular types of events may be.

Before undertaking an LCLIP you will need to decide its spatial scale and scope. Typically, the scale will be your authority's area, but particularly for district councils it may be worth working with partners, such as your county council, or neighbouring authorities, to look at a broader area. It may also be worth finding out whether any nearby authorities have already undertaken LCLIPs, because the impacts they have identified may be similar to those for your area. Generally it will be worth considering all significant climate impacts in the area, in which case the LCLIP will also be of value for the service provider and community leader roles. However, for practical reasons it may only be simpler to restrict more detailed follow up investigations to impacts directly affecting your authority.

1. The LCLIP page on UKCIP site provides a range of resources to assist in conducting LCLIPs including a simple booklet offering guidance on the method and details of other authorities carrying out studies. The page is updated regularly with the latest information.
2. Devon County Council prepared a very detailed Project Brief for their LCLIP project. This modified the stages as set out by UKCIP to fit the purposes of the County and indicates longer term implications for their Sustainable Community Strategy.

1. Details on the original Oxfordshire County Council pilot LCLIP are available from the UKCIP website. Other case studies will be added as they become available.