How climate change is having an impact on policing - Dr Alan Billings

There may be better ways of using buildings by sharing them with other public services, such as Fire and Rescue – something we already do at Maltby and with the vehicle repair shop in Rotherham. And so on.

But climate change will have other consequences. We know something about what they will be, but we cannot know where or when they will happen. These are the extreme weather events that have been happening across the world now for the last few years – extreme heat, extreme cold, floods and fires. We saw something of this in parts of South Yorkshire with significant flooding from the River Don between Sheffield and the Humber, especially around Doncaster.

We also had temperatures in the high 30s leading to fires in several parts of the county as grasslands and moors caught alight.

Later this year there is the possibility of El Nino causing the kind of high temperatures in the UK that we witnessed recently in Spain.

Part of my holding to account role is to see whether the police are prepared for such eventualities. Which raises the question: how do you prepare for the unknown and unpredictable?

This is where I think the police are doing what they can. They call it scenario planning. I have been to some of these training sessions.

Essentially, they consist of taking a group of senior officers, putting them round a table together, giving them an imagined situation, and asking them to plan what they would do next.

To make the situation more realistic, from time to time, as the day goes on, more information is given so that plans have to be adapted or changed.

In this way, officers are schooled not in how to meet this specific challenge or that, but in how to meet any challenge that might present itself and how to be flexible if the scene changes. These are the sorts of skills – imagination, the ability to remain calm under pressure, flexibility – that are needed whatever event comes along.

I believe we have a force that is as well prepared as any can be given that we don’t know what is coming, only that something almost certainly will come as a result of climate change. In the South Yorkshire floods and fires we saw this capability tested for real.

I have one thing in common with police officers: we have both sworn oaths of allegiance to the monarch.

The police do so at what is called the attestation ceremony – when they first become a warranted officer. In front of a magistrate the oath starts with these words:

‘I (name) of South Yorkshire Police, do solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm that I will well and truly serve the King in the office of constable, with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality…’

As an Anglican priest I did something similar when I was first ordained and then each time I took up a new clerical appointment.

A shortened version of the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire’s latest blog post.