UK cricket club, pub and historic remains all under threat from climate change

Th childhood home of poet William Wordsworth is also at risk according to a new report

Work begins on March 19, 2014 to demolish a cottage at Birling Gap which was at risk of collapsing due to coastal erosion caused – at least in part – by climate change. Mike Hewitt / Getty Images

For 129 years, the Corbridge Cricket Club stood peaceably next to the River Tyne, with the occasional batsman hitting the ball out of the park and into the water. Then, in December 2015, the river invaded the cricket club.

Amid torrential winter rain across the UK, Corbridge’s corner of Northumberland in north-east England experienced heavy flooding. “The whole south side of the village was flooded,” Michael Robinson, the club’s secretary, recalled. “The water went through our changing rooms and the pavilion.”

The club suffered roughly £100,000 (Dh460,000) of damage. Other parts of Corbridge fared worse. Some homes remain shut up and uninhabitable.

“There’s always a risk, sitting next to the river,” Mr Robinson said. “The environmental agency had been strengthening the flood defences. It was just that, in that year, Mother Nature decided she would come over the defences.”

Such extreme weather events are more and more likely to happen, as climate change affects the UK. The Corbridge Cricket Club is one of many sites of cultural, historical and natural significance across the UK that are threatened by climate change, according to a newly published report.

Co-authored by the non-profit Climate Coalition and Leeds University’s Priestley International Centre for Climate, the report describes how the UK is already experiencing some of the consequences of climate change.

“When you have a weather-related effect, you always wonder how much is down to bad luck and how much down to climate change,” said Piers Forster, the director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate. “Our calculations try to determine this. In the end, some weather events are just the weather, but climate change will be a contributing factor in some, and a dominant factor in a few.”

Based on field studies and media reports, Mr Forster and his colleagues identified a dozen case studies of special places under threat.

The Corbridge Cricket Club is one. So is the Mark Addy Pub in Lancashire, which was similarly flooded in December 2015 and remains closed.

On one of the Orkney Islands, off the north coast of Scotland, the remains of a 5,000-year-old settlement are in danger because of “increasing frequency of storm events and sea level rise, which contribute to higher rates of coastal erosion,” said Mairi Davies, the climate change manager for Historic Environment Scotland, a government body.

In the Lake District, in the north-west of England, the childhood home of the poet William Wordsworth sits at the confluence of two rivers, both liable to flood in a season of extraordinary rain. It has already happened once. In November 2009, 300mm of rainfall in 24 hours completely wrecked the gardens. The National Trust, the UK government agency that tends to sites of national significance, spent £500,000 on repairing the damage.

Other threatened sites include the Slimbridge Wetlands in Gloucestershire, home to nearly 200 species of birds; the Birling Gap chalk cliffs in Sussex, endangered by coastal erosion; and the Beckmickle Ing woodlands, not far from the Lake District.

The report intentionally focuses on sites closely associated with British identity, Dr Forster said. “It was deliberate to try to appeal to a slightly different audience than normal — people who don’t normally consider climate change in their day-to-day lives.”

He concedes that traditional methods of imparting the message, such as putting out detailed academic analyses and sounding considered warnings — have failed to convey the magnitude of climate change. “I think the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in the US shows that liberals have not been effective in engaging large sections of society.”

For Mr Robinson, floods are now an ever-present danger on the horizon.

The club repaired the damage to its playing field in time for the beginning of the 2016 cricket season last April. A new clubhouse will open this May, although this one has been built on stilts. “It’s a metre and a half off the ground, so that even if the river floods again, it’ll be OK,” Mr Robinson said.

Climate change is an issue, he acknowledged. “We’re in February, and I’m looking out of my bedroom window, and it isn’t cold. The wind has become milder, and we get rain rather than snow. We hope that the December 2015 flood was a sort of once-in-a-lifetime thing, a monumental thing. But we know the climate is changing. I think the thing to do is, you just have to get on with it.”