Climate Change Adaptation Strategy

Introduction

We recognise that planning for climate change adaptation is essential for the successful future of our business. We want to understand the vulnerabilities and risks we face as a result of climate change. We will take action to make our business resilient, to enable us to sustain our support for the Scottish economy whilst increasing passenger and stakeholder confidence.

Objective

Our strategic objective is to build resilience to climate change into our business processes in order to maintain a reliable train service. When it is not possible to maintain a normal service we will have established a weather event plan to ensure that the business recovers to provide a normal service as soon as possible. We will effectively communicate all changes to our customers and stakeholders.

Strategy

To achieve our objective and make well informed, targeted investment in our systems and processes we have identified the risks from climate change and extreme weather events. We are putting measures in place to mitigate potential impacts to the business via our Adaptation Action Plan and have integrated both the risks and our action plan within our Environmental Management System (EMS).

We are collecting and analysing weather and performance data and are collaborating with stakeholders to boost our collective knowledge and expand reporting. We understand that improving our resilience to climate change can only progress when we work with with our alliance partners: Network Rail, other transport groups and interested parties, with the common goal to provide a robust railway service across the country.

Network Rail has a vision to deliver a “railway fit for the future” and an aim to increase the resilience of the network to weather events and future climate change impacts. To a large extent the ability to run our services relies on the resilience of the infrastructure. We are working with Network Rail in the review of their Weather Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation (WRCCA) Plan for Scotland Route to ensure a collaborative approach, and we will integrate the shared responsibilities within our own Adaptation Action Plan.

The Alliance also has an established Extreme Weather Action Team (EWAT) and formal process for managing disruption during extreme weather events. The EWAT review weather data to determine potential impacts and take action depending on the severity of the threat.

Adaptation Action Plan

Our strategy is supported by an Adaptation Action Plan. This Scotland-wide plan is the first step towards identifying current and future weather and climate vulnerabilities, prioritising risks and exploring the necessary actions that we need to take to increase resilience.

We recognise that the Adaptation Action Plan needs to be a live document to be effective in a changing environment. Through its development we will work with external agencies to participate in strategic planning and information sharing events. We will collect and share data with Transport Scotland and Network Rail to contribute to identifying the business impacts of long term climate change. Our action plan will help us to maintain and secure our service delivery, providing a sustainable Scottish transport network resilient to the challenges that climate change brings.