Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and extent of damaging floods in the UK and elsewhere in northern Europe. As evidenced by widespread flooding across northern England, Wales and southern Scotland in 2015/16 current flood risk management (FRM) policy that relies on engineered flood defences and allocates funds to those areas with the most assets, including households at risk, is failing large parts of the UK. In response at-risk communities are open to piloting new ways to manage flood risk. These include implementing natural flood management (NFM) which describes a series of measures that utilise natural processes such as planting trees to intercept precipitation, altering land cover and agricultural management to slow overland water flows and increasing floodplain storage through reconnecting rivers to the floodplain. NFM has the potential, through increasing water stored in the catchment, to alleviate pressure on, and extend the protection of, engineered flood defences. Furthermore, NFM interventions at the scale of a catchment may produce co-benefits, such as increased carbon sequestration in (restored/conserved) peatlands, biodiversity on floodplain meadows and sustain connection to place.
The Action research is crucial as for NFM to deliver there is a need to not only understand when and how NFM can be effective at reducing flood risk, and to determine which NFM measures are particularly effective, but also to better understand implementation issues. This is because NFM, unlike traditional engineered flood defences, is implemented at the catchment scale, often on private land and it may alter landscape aesthetics. It is therefore important to understand: which groups benefit from a catchment-based approach to FRM; what are the co-benefits of NFM and can these be monetarily valued; if different groups in society have divergent views about NFM; and to learn how groups are partnering to deliver NFM. Better understanding of these issues and learning from catchments that are piloting NFM is a necessary step to allocating funds to NFM within a more integrated FRM policy.
The conclusions of this Action are:
(1) current media reporting of floods in the UK that emphasise blame might contribute to communities being slow to adopt preparedness activities but good news stories, including about NFM pilots, might breakthrough blame and encourage activities to build community resilience. Further, it is suggestive of needed changes in government communication with the public including coupling information about climate change impacts with policy to increase preparedness;
(2) it is important to understand how different groups in society view NFM as these may affect delivery of NFM, for instance we find that farmers are more circumspect about a future role for NFM than many other groups, including conservation groups. This is critical as farmers are a potential key NFM implementation group;
(3) open source tools can model flood risk reduction benefits and co-benefits from installing NFM but these tools require significant expert and local knowledge meaning they are unlikely to be useful in the appraisal of alternative FRM options by local government;
(4) partnership working is often necessary to deliver NFM projects and small groups can be significant to better networking catchment partnerships. In an urban area biochemical evidence challenged perceptions of environmental pressures on a waterway and provided a gateway for partnership working;
(5) monetary valuation exercises are of interest to catchment partnerships contemplating NFM options but there is significant concern that alternative options are not co-developed and that many aspects of value, such as cultural and long-term resilience remain challenging to monetarily value and therefore to include in any benefit-cost analysis appraising different approaches to FRM;
(6) interdisciplinary research may sometimes involve atypical research partnerships, for instance with the creative arts. Such partnerships challenge research methodologies but in this case were useful to generate information about catchment-based cultural benefits.
In all strands of this research the fellow has indicated how these conclusions might affect policy recommendations around communication with the public, funding of pilots, partnerships and visioning exercises, devolution of FRM and in the identification of knowledge gaps. In thinking about the Action research as a whole the fellow learned much from comparing the catchments and acted as a conduit for disseminating lessons learned between the case study catchments.
