ABSTRACT
How should policy makers and other stakeholders respond to the potential impacts of climate change? Given the relatively high uncertainty associated with potential impacts due to: uncertainty in the underlying climate change science (Chapter 4); in the precise identification and quantification of the impacts (Chapter 5); and uncertainty in the effectiveness of adaptation, responding to climate change is above all concerned with managing in a context of high uncertainty. In this chapter, we consider how individual organisations and companies have responded to climate change impacts and other approaches available to them (Sections 8.2 and 8.3). At a collective level, policy making institutions have to consider how to integrate climate change into local and regional polices and we consider the opportunities for the East Midlands in Section 8.4. Targets and indicators, the subject of Sections 8.5 and 8.6, are important in this process for a number of reasons: they help consensus to emerge on the desirable and documented direction of current and future trends and they help the appropriate information to be gathered for trend analysis. Finally, in Section 8.7 we consider some of the future research needs which have arisen from this study.
