November 2, 2016

expert reaction to ‘Future Flood Prevention’ report

The House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee has published a report on the prevention of future floods which makes a number of recommendations including simplifying risk communication and improving resilience.

Prof. Roger Kemp FREng, University of Lancaster and author of the Royal Academy of Engineering 2016 report Living without electricity – One city’s experience of coping with loss of power, said:

“I welcome the committee’s report on flood risk. While we appreciate the importance of the flood risk to homes, I would like to have seen more consideration of the risk to infrastructure systems. Our experience in Lancaster during the 2015/16 winter storms showed that disruption to essential services can seriously impact many people not directly affected by flooding.

“Following Storm Desmond, 100,000 people in Lancaster lost power for several days. Without power, the internet, mobile phones and social media did not work. People in high-rise buildings had no heat, light, water, lifts or even a door intercom. Elderly people who rely on powered medical equipment, mobile care providers, alarm systems and stair lifts were marooned without access to the outside world. Motorists found they could not open their garage doors and petrol stations could not dispense fuel. Bank ATM machines did not work and shops could not accept electronic payment cards.

“It is impossible to ensure that floods do not occur but we have to ensure that they do not cause the loss of essential services. Electricity infrastructure can be protected against flooding, however remote the possibility. For example, power and telephone connection boxes should be mounted well above the pavement, not at ground level or in manholes. At least a proportion of mobile phone base stations need backup supplies so a basic service can be maintained at all times and organisations like schools and health centres need to carry out periodic exercises to ensure they know how to respond to a loss of supply. Our objective should be to minimise disruption, not attempt to eliminate floods.”

Prof. Hannah Cloke, Professor of Hydrology at the University of Reading, said:

“We must recognise that we need to learn to live with flooding. This report highlights how we can prepare better for damaging floods by changing the way in which we practice flood risk management. There must be continued investment in what we know to work, such as the flood early warning systems provided by the Environment Agency and the Flood Forecasting Centre, but we also need to use our best scientific understanding of how river catchments work to apply the benefits of natural flood management practices.”

Prof. Jim Hall FREng, Professor of Climate and Environmental Risks and Director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, said:

“The EFRA committee is absolute right to argue for a more holistic approach to flood risk management. In fact I don’t think they go far enough: Brexit offers the opportunity to innovate the incentives and regulations for farmers to ensure that they are not only contributing to flood risk management, but also helping to restore the quality of rivers and ecosystems. This requires a catchment-based approached. That said, we need to be realistic about the benefits of natural flood management. So far the evidence demonstrates that catchment restoration helps to reduce the impact of small floods in small catchments – there will be the limits to the effectiveness of these schemes in the most extreme floods and in larger catchments.”

Dr Marc Stutter, Managing Catchments and Coasts research theme leader at the James Hutton Institute, said:

“It is encouraging that the unprecedented floods of last winter have triggered such a holistic re-assessment of how we should tackle flooding utilising conventional engineering approaches, crucially backed up by socio-economic, governance and practical water management recommendations across catchments.

“Widespread rainfall on a catchment is best tackled close to where runoff starts using numerous temporary water retaining features across landscapes. Water management up the catchment will make our built flood structures downstream more resilient to future climate extremes. Whilst it can be argued that so called natural flood management is uncertain, it can be cheap to build, also manage soil erosion and mobilises community action. At the same time water-stewardship is a societal benefit and should be given adequate reward to farmers and locals (conceptually this should be viewed as payment for a service, not compensation for a loss). The time has come to properly trial such options under this new holistic flood mitigation program.”

‘Future flood prevention’ will be published by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee on Wednesday 2 November 2016. 

Declared interests

Dr Stutter: I have no work ongoing, nor recent with the authors’ organisations or steering group. My research on water and catchment systems is funded by Scottish Government, EU and UK Research Council projects.