Energy and Environment Institute, University of Hull FRE0093
Written evidence submitted by Kate Smith, Stuart McLelland, Giles Davidson, and Briony McDonagh (Energy and Environment Institute, University of Hull) to the Environmental Audit Committee inquiry on Flood Resilience
The Energy and Environment Institute at the University of Hull has a research focus encompassing many of the challenges highlighted by this inquiry’s terms of reference. We work in inter- and transdisciplinary ways on a range of flood resilience topics, from monitoring and modelling of sustainable drainage solutions, to arts-based participatory work with communities. The responses below reflect the breadth of our expertise in these fields based on our extensive knowledge exchange, research and teaching experience.
1. To what extent are current flood resilience assets and interventions fit-for-purpose and what are the strengths and weaknesses? Are there alternative approaches from across the UK and elsewhere which could help inform improvements and innovation?
1.1 The UK's ability to adapt to increasing future flood risk, and learn from existing approaches, is hampered by the severely limited training and development infrastructure available to flood risk management agencies. According to the OECD, each year floods cause more than $40 billion in damage worldwide. In England alone, five major flood events since 2007 have been estimated by the Environment Agency to have caused an estimated £7.6bn of economic damage, whilst 5.2 million homes and businesses were at direct risk of flooding in the UK in 2020. There is also compelling evidence linking floods to adverse mental health and wellbeing outcomes.
1.2 Yet still, in January 2025 following heavy rainfall and snowmelt, widespread flooding caused major incidents to be declared, transport and utility infrastructure to be affected across the country, mass evacuations and, tragically, loss of life. In light of this reality, it is hard to make the case that current flood resilience assets and interventions are fit for purpose. At a strategic level, we have identified four key challenges:
(i) The connection between the research base and industry supporting innovation in flood resilience needs to be stronger and more diverse
(ii) An established commercial flood resilience sector is lacking in the UK, as are incubators, accelerators and business clusters which directly support flood resilience, including for development and testing.
(iii) There are significant skills shortages at all levels to grow innovation and implement best practice in flood resilience and preparedness.
(iv) Responsibility for flood resilience is fragmented, being shared between many disparate organisations and government departments, with no single point of national focus.
1.3 To address this need, the University of Hull and Humberside Fire and Rescue Service have proposed the National Flood Resilience Centre, a world-leading centre for research, innovation and learning, focussed on sustainable flood resilience and climate adaptation. It will stimulate an innovative business ecosystem in knowledge-based climate resilience. Located at the western gateway to the Humber region, with excellent national and international connectivity, it will be available to users and collaborators from all sectors of the economy across the UK. The Centre will drive, support and deliver world class research, development and innovation in flooding and flood resilience through collaboration and in-house expertise in climate resilience innovation and the development of specialist skills in flood resilience, response and recovery. Bringing citizens, businesses, communities, government and specialists together in new and creative ways, it will help build preparedness and resilience and provide a national focus to inform policy development.
1.4 The Centre will provide bespoke flood simulation and testing facilities, developed over multiple phases, creating a step change in activity, impact and public benefit. As a result, flood professionals and researchers will grow their practical understanding of floods and flood processes leading to better predictive and resilience capabilities and outcomes. This will lead to a wider range of better flood resilience products, services and infrastructure to mitigate the impact of flooding so that communities and businesses can be back in action more quickly, reducing cost, disruption and trauma. UK policy and standards in flood governance, preparedness, resilience and response will be better supported and informed, and shortages in flood resilience specialisms will be addressed. Overall, damage, loss and disruption due to flooding will be reduced as communities become more resilient to flood risk and better prepared for flood when it occurs. A key policy intervention is to facilitate financial support for the partners in the National Flood Resilience Centre to bring this ambitious and crucial investment to fruition.
2. How appropriate is the current balance between 'green' NBS and 'grey' hard infrastructure assets and what adjustments, if any, are needed to improve it?
N/A
3. What changes to the planning system and building regulations are needed to ensure that buildings and infrastructure are resilient to flooding in the short, medium and long-term?
3.1 The cumulative impact of ribbon development is not currently adequately visible within the planning system, and risk modelling does not respond quickly enough to contextual changes arising from new floodplain developments. The challenge meeting government commitments to provide significant additional housing needs to be balanced against increasing climate hazards (both in terms of too much and too little water). It is inappropriate and counter-productive to build new properties in areas of high flood risk and without adequate flood resilience measures at community, development and property level. More focus should be afforded within the planning system on requirements to install sustainable drainage systems that are optimised for performance. Developments should follow a 'drainage first' design philosophy. Moreover, our research suggests that SuDS which comply with planning requirements could offer significantly better management of surface water if they had been designed, at no additional cost, for optimal performance rather than basic legal compliance.
3.2 We would also advocate regulations requiring the incorporation of property-level flood resilience (PFR) measures on new properties and for general property upgrades, extensions or improvements (as is the case for electrical work in property upgrades, for example). A key focus is to 'normalise' PFR measures, building acceptance of PFR as routine rather than problematic, establishing market demand and driving growth in supply. A certification system for PFR which is more accessible to manufacturers, which is evidence-based and relates more closely to real-world flood risk would support more diverse market provision and make PFR more accessible to home and business owners. Crucially, a better understand of the difference that PFR makes to cost/damage would also support the growth of more nuanced and parametric models of flood insurance as we look to the ending of the current iteration of the Flood Re scheme.
4. To what extent are current metrics for monitoring the effectiveness of flood resilience fit for purpose, and what improvements could make them more effective?
4.1 There is minimal monitoring of existing flood resilience assets (privately-owned or otherwise) which means that we have limited/no data on their operational effectiveness. This impacts our ability to model and/or predict the behaviour of flood and water management systems - and crucially limits our understanding of the effectiveness of different management strategies (for example the interventionist, technical approach of most internal drainage boards vs more holistic, biodiversity net-gain focussed nature-based solutions). This also means we have limited to no data on which flood resilience interventions are most effective or cost-effective over different timescales, and therefore cannot necessarily select the best options for improving flood resilience. SuDS and flood resilience/resistance interventions should therefore be required to include monitoring equipment.
4.2 Low-cost options for monitoring are available and would be a very small proportion of infrastructure costs, and sharing data from this kind of monitoring would greatly improve the quality of input data for risk modelling, as well as providing hyper-local information to inform the implementation of deployable flood resistance measures such as PFR. This would in turn improve the accuracy of flood warning systems, and enable effective maintenance and operation of infrastructure, and would enable better evaluation of the most effective interventions (in terms both of cost and water/flood management).
4.3 An example of this kind of monitoring project is the Doncaster, Immingham and Grimsby (DIG) Surface Water Resilience Project, which is part of the £200 million Flood and Coastal Resilience and Innovation Programme (FCRIP) funded by DEFRA as part of their aims to drive innovation in flood resilience and climate change adaptation. The consortium is made up of the local authorities in the area (North East Lincolnshire Council and the City of Doncaster Council) and the water companies (Anglian Water and Yorkshire Water).
4.4 The main DIG activities involve the construction and post construction appraisal of Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) to actively mitigate against flooding (surface and sewer). Forming multi-beneficial assets that also improve water quality, biodiversity and amenity. Through a hydraulic monitoring programme led collaboratively with the University of Hull, these SuDS are instrumented to assess volumetric attenuation and functionality. In total the DIG project has around 1,000 different sensor measurements being collected from assets such as rain gardens, downpipe interventions and ponds. Pre-construction monitoring has also proved to be pivotable to understand the baseline responses to the system itself, such as with sewer monitoring. The key to assessing performance of systems is the need for the foresight to monitor beforehand to gain a representative baseline and also afterwards to compare against.
5. How effectively and frequently do flood risk management authorities work together to tackle flooding issues and do they have sufficient resources and skills available to carry out their work?
5.1 The Living With Water partnership, in which the University of Hull is a partner, is an outstanding exemplar of co-operation between flood risk management authorities , water companies and academia, and is a model that has been applied in the DIG project above. Having a cross-boundary, cross-sector consortium allows the transfer of knowledge and best practice between them that might otherwise struggle to collaborate. However, in reality, outwith the ongoing top-down commitments and resource that make the Living With Water partnership successful, collaboration on innovative interventions is made systematically difficult due to barriers of the respective parties: water companies are governed by financial and commercial focus; councils are under-resourced financially and in terms of personnel; and University have an ambitious research remit while having to both be careful to avoid over stretching resources or impacting on commercial practices. It can be, in practice, very difficult to meet all of these operational expectations whilst delivering effective interventions in a timely way.
6. What should the key priorities be for the Flood Resilience Taskforce, and how can it enhance coordination and improve flood resilience?
6.1 The Flood Resilience Task force comprises almost exclusively public sector/state actors but many organisations, communities and sectors outside of the public sector are key to formulating and implementing effective action for flood resilience. The Taskforce needs to reach out and engage a plurality of flood resilience leadership/thought leadership outside of government (e.g. to academia, business). Through this it should explore and facilitate new ways of engaging communities. It should work with specialists to support communities in understanding their flood risk better and to take steps to enhance their resilience. It should promote novel methods for bringing relevant parties together to better understand the challenges and work collaboratively towards improvements - ie agencies and other responsible entities such as water companies and insurance companies as well as communities. It should work to increase opportunities for research and training in flood management and flood resilience - especially in areas that are presently under-researched such as sustainable drainage, property level flood resilience measures and community action. It should engage with and support the development of a National Flood Resilience Centre, as proposed by the University of Hull and Humberside Fire and Rescue Service.
7. Is there a backlog in maintenance of existing flood adaptation/resilience assets and in identifying where new ones could be introduced?
8. What level of flood resilience is required to address the flood risks identified in the Climate Change Risk Assessment and is current funding adequate to meet these risks effectively?
9. How can the Government encourage more long-term private investment in flooding defences and resilience measures?
10. What support to property owners and neighbourhoods require to enhance their resilience to flooding?
10.1 We need to ensure that those most impacted by climate change and increasing flood risk have a key voice in decision-making around flood and coastal resilience. Place-based arts and humanities (A&H) approaches offer effective tools for supporting residents, communities and business-owners to raise awareness, build flood resilience and co-devise flood preparedness actions. This includes estuarine and coastal communities at the forefront of the UK climate transition, and individuals and groups not previously well-engaged with government policy and action.
10.2 Part of the UK Climate Resilience Programme (2019-2023), the UKRI-funded Risky Cities project used A&H to demonstrate the effectiveness of mobilising flood histories to drive flood resilience in Kingston upon Hull (UK), an estuarine town with high flood risk and low public flood preparedness. The project developed and evaluated a range of place-based creative initiatives delivered in 2021-2024, showing that place-based A&H can help make complex scientific ideas meaningful and big global narratives tangible at the local level (McDonagh et al, 2023; Smith et al, 2024). This supports people to understand what uncertain climate futures might mean for them - and what practical actions they can start to take to increase their resilience, including individual flood preparedness actions. We showed that engaging with Risky Cities' A&H activities and creative outputs drove cognitive shifts around climate, flood risk and living with water, offering space for difficult conversations about coastal erosion and flooding. We therefore recommend that funding for engagement goes beyond tokenistic engagement to solicit public acceptance of new interventions, and that in future there is proper resource and training allocated to place-based participatory engagement as a route to mobilising long-term public engagement with the reality of climate adaptation now and in the future.
January 2025
References and resources:
https://engageenvironmentagency.uk.engagementhq.com/nel014-dig
https://floodinnovation.co.uk/
https://www.hull.ac.uk/research/institutes/eei/national-flood-resilience-centre
McDonagh, B., Brookes, E., Smith, K., Worthen, H., Coulthard, T.J., Hughes, G., Mottram, S., Skinner, A., Chamberlain, J. Learning histories, participatory methods and creative engagement for climate resilience. Journal of Historical Geography, Volume 82, 2023, Pages 91-97,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2023.09.002
Smith, K., McDonagh, B., & Brookes, E. (2024). Place-Based Arts Engagement and Learning Histories: An Effective Tool for Climate Action. Environmental Communication, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2024.2382473
https://web-archive.oecd.org/2018-01-29/404918-financial-management-of-flood-risk.htm