Assessing opportunities and constraints

Building up a picture of the future in terms of energy demand, emissions, climate risks and adaptive capacity is a helpful way to understand the opportunities and constraints in your area. The output of this process is an energy and adaptation opportunities plan which is a visual representation of the baseline condition for your evidence base.

The plans may be displayed separately but should be overlaid during policy development. This process is important; an area that appears suitable for sustainable energy generation may be at high risk from flooding or in an area that is prone to overheating problems. The presence of a vulnerable population could add to the complexity; a solution will need to be sought which resolves such conflicts and leads to a policy objective which demonstrates an integrated approach to adaptation and mitigation.

Sustainable Energy

The local authority will by this stage have identified and mapped the key components of significance to sustainable energy potential; see setting a baseline for details. This process results in the energy opportunities plan (EOP) which is a key document in creating an evidence base for a number of policy objectives.

The process of identifying opportunities from the EOP will involve you or your consultant (if you have appointed one) examining the plan to identify spatially significant energy loads and drawing broad boundaries around each area of interest – each of these areas effectively constitute an opportunity. Opportunities typically might encompass:

• a variety of buildings (or several groups of buildings) with significant energy demands which are in close proximity, e.g. a cluster of high rise social housing, a hospital, a school and an area of existing dense housing might make a good opportunity to examine in more detail;
• areas which are sufficiently far from dwellings, roads, flight paths, designated areas such as AONBs etc (i.e. are ‘unconstrained’) where it may be possible to provide wind turbines;
• areas where it may be possible to grow crops for biomass fuel;
• rivers where it may be possible to use hydro power and so on.

The identified opportunities should then be tested with a broad group of key stakeholders such as; colleagues within your authority, other public sector bodies (the Environment Agency etc), land owners, developers and so on. See stakeholder engagement for details of how you might go about this process.

Once stakeholder feedback has been sought, amendments can be made to the EOP in light of new information and the feedback of the stakeholders. Once the areas of interest have been established, a test of feasibility should be applied to understand the deliverability of a range of energy solutions being provided for each opportunity.

Adaptation

If your local authority has adopted NI188 or has signed the Nottingham Declaration it may be preparing for, or be in the process of, carrying out a risk assessment, to inform the development of an action plan. It is important that the spatial assessment of climate risks and impacts is integrated with these efforts.

If you are carrying out the risk assessment independently you may wish to use the UK Climate Impacts Programme Adaptation Wizard, which is based on the ‘Risk, Uncertainty and Decision-Making Framework’. You will be able to use the Adaptation Wizard even if you are new to climate change and don’t have a good understanding of your climate risks. This is about encouraging a precautionary approach in recognition that we cannot predict exactly how the climate will change in the future. UKCP09 can be used alongside the Adaptation Wizard. UKCP09 gives information about the changing climate but not the impacts it has. You may wish to carry out this work with input from corporate risk management officers.

There are four key risk areas to consider in your risk assessment:

• Increasing temperatures and the urban heat island
• Flood risk
• Water availability and quality
• Land stability

The risks and impacts that are identified will help you to understand which areas may not be suitable for development or where adaptation measures are required to ensure adequate resilience. For example, a site might be in a high-risk flood area. The study area should also be scoped for opportunities to implement adaptation options and improve adaptive capacity, for example identification of suitable flood storage areas or suitable locations where the quality of the public realm could be improved using green infrastructure. It may be helpful to focus on areas of change as an opportunity gateway for adaptation policy:

• Is a particular area being considered for development, perhaps as a growth area or in the Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment?
• Has an area been set aside for a Masterplan or Area Action Plan to bring forward development?
• Could this be used to improve the adaptive capacity of existing communities?

Using GIS it is possible to overlay this information with the risks to create a constraints and opportunities map. It may be appropriate to do this for different timescales, certainly for the short and medium term as climate risks are likely to change over time.