LAST summer’s floods in the Borders has prompted 10 Scottish councils and key agencies to join together to plan for extreme weather and the impact of climate change.
It is hoped that better planning will reduce the number of costly emergency operations.
The idea for the climate risk group came from Scottish Borders Council’s own emergency planning officer, Jim Fraser.
Mr Fraser said: “It can be a hard sell to justify spending money to prepare for climate risks in the future. But, as several Scottish local authorities know, the cost of repairing the damage can be much higher.
“I wanted to set up a project group with other Scottish local authorities to allow us to support and assist each other to tackle this challenge.”
Mr Fraser added: “Within our own local authority area we activated our emergency arrangements on a number of occasions to deal with last year’s flooding.
“The flooding in Jedburgh in August was declared a ‘major incident’ by the police, meaning lives could have been lost. This was a result of the exceptional level of rain that fell within a very short period of time.”
The first group meeting was held last Thursday and was facilitated by Adaptation Scotland, a Scottish Government-funded programme.