There are some very unpalatable decisions to be made as we kick the can ever further down the road on climate change. Adaptation will be painful, some of us are already suffering, there seems little hope that this suffering is not going to be shared further.

It feels like in coastal regions we have already made the decision to abandon land to the changing water levels. Doing so further inland or allow flood plains to once again shape towns and cities feels more controversial. But what do you do when the cost of protecting something becomes higher that its value? How practically do we pay for those defences?

There’s a lot of conversation about Reform’s growing popularity in the South Wales valleys. It will be interesting to see what they propose to do about increasingly wild flooding there especially where they’ve denied the effects of climate change in the past. How are they going to square the demand for action with their instinct to normalise the present?

I think the thing about adaptation is that people don’t wish to be inconvenienced today if they that it is other people’s children who will suffer the consequences. Even within nation states, someone who has the means to make good the consequences of a flood, who can afford insurance against the consequences, has a very different perception of what the future risks might be.