BEFORE THE FLOOD
With flooding in the UK becoming more frequent, access to resilient infrastructure and robust forward planning is a must to secure people’s safety. We speak to Jan Przydatek and Savina Carluccio to explore how government can enact change and save lives
The United Kingdom has become accustomed to named storms battering its shores, bringing flood water inland and submerging already vulnerable, low-level places of residence. In recent months, storms Babet, Ciarán and Debi all hit our country, bringing destruction and disruption to critical and built infrastructure. The economic cost of flooding to the UK has been estimated at £740m per year.
Data from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation (LRF), a charity which promotes safety, engineering-related research and education, highlights flooding as one of the most common natural hazards the UK has experienced in the last five years. Given this, you would be forgiven for thinking that the country’s infrastructure, both new and legacy, would be resilient against intense rainfall. Sadly, that’s not the case. A reactive approach to infrastructure resilience in the UK has left homes, buildings, and critical infrastructure vulnerable to significant damage when storms hit, according to Jan Przydatek, director of technologies at LRF. At present, communities are reliant on short-term fixes such as sandbags.
“Reactive methods do not prepare the built environment for the severe weather that is expected to become more frequent,” he says. “Our changing climate is already demonstrating that established methods used to build infrastructure are no longer as effective at protecting those who depend on services and structures.
This is why a different approach is needed to build resilient critical infrastructure.”
Structural instability
The National Audit Office’s latest value for money report on resilience to flooding, published in November 2023, noted that government doubled its capital funding in the six years to 2027 “to combat the growing dangers from flooding”. However, the report also stated that a £34m shortfall in the Environment Agency’s annual maintenance funding between 2022 to 2023 has put more than 200,000 UK properties at increased risk of flooding.
The report also found that significant underspending by Defra and the Environment Agency has led to poor value for money in the first two years of the government funded capital programme, stating that “building new flood defences and maintaining existing ones is no longer enough and that a wider range of interventions is now needed to build resilience against increasing flood risk”.
As Przydatek explains: “The UK’s infrastructure is not viewed with the same strategic urgency as other national challenges such as health or security, leaving us with a reactive approach to infrastructure which, as the NAO states, is not working. For too long, the UK has built structures, including homes, that are not equipped to withstand environmental change.
“The government has a crucial part to play in enacting the required change, such as retrofitting the 30m homes which make up a huge proportion of the UK legacy building stock with more resilient building materials.”
The human cost
Ultimately, the built environment should be designed to keep its inhabitants safe. “Whether it’s homes, or places of education or work, we subconsciously rely on our built environment often without acknowledging it,” Przydatek says. “But buildings cannot withstand changing natural hazards to the extent we are seeing without crucial adjustments being made. Resilience requires these places to be purposefully built to avoid flooding before it strikes.”
The human cost of flooding is well documented. Fallen trees cut off power to communities and lives are taken in flash flooding and strong currents. Loss of access to critical services means many people also find themselves isolated for a prolonged period, regardless of their geographical location. As a result, the public’s level of trust in national and local government often fluctuates when flooding occurs.
Data from the latest World Risk Poll – LRF’s annual global study of perceptions and experiences of risk to people’s safety – highlighted northern and western Europe (including the UK) as bucking a global trend when it came to trusting national government during natural disasters. When asked how well prepared national and local government were to deal with a disaster from a natural hazard, respondents in the region had more confidence in local government’s preparedness (40%) compared to national government (37%) – the reverse of perceptions in much of the world.
This gap in trust is further highlighted when looking at respondents who have lost access to critical infrastructure as a result of a disaster. In the UK, 45% of respondents who had lost access to either electricity, clean water, food, medicine, medical care, or telephone services said they had confidence in their local government to deal with a disaster, four percentage points higher than their confidence in national government (41%). Globally,
most respondents showed higher levels of trust in their national government.
“With an evidenced lack of trust in the UK national government’s level of preparedness when it comes to dealing with disasters, it is imperative that plans for a collaborative approach between local and national governments are improved,” Przydatek adds.
A joint approach
According to Przydatek, sufficient levels of infrastructure resilience are only possible with strong involvement and investment from national government. Informed decision making in infrastructure planning can help building stock absorb and recover from shocks and stresses caused by flooding, but only if the right equipment and steps are in place.
To enact cultural change in building and project design, both local and national government must work together to develop and communicate the best resilience strategies based on robust standards.
Savina Carluccio, executive director of the International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure, who works with policymakers to improve the uptake of effective disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies, says: “It is imperative that governments urgently improve the uptake of DRR and resilience measures, and communicate these measures to the public and businesses in a way they can relate to. Actions that can be taken include incentivising and prioritising the development of projects aimed at enhancing the climate and disaster resilience of critical infrastructure and protecting vulnerable populations, as well as promoting adoption and implementation of global frameworks, such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.
“Policymakers should adopt multidisciplinary advisory panels for disaster risk reduction and resilience. The inclusion of multi-disciplinary technical advisers would increase the influence of technically driven disaster risk reduction and resilience measures in policy, as well as help restore confidence from the public that what is being planned and implemented is grounded in evidence and practice and that it will deliver safe, future-proof, resilient infrastructure that is fit for people and the planet.”
A UK example of a multi-stakeholder DRR project can be found in Hull and Haltemprice, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. The region’s sloping topography and bowl shape means a mere two per cent of the area is not considered at risk of flooding. This risk necessitates a joinedup approach from multiple bodies to build flood resilience and develop innovative and natural water management systems.
This ‘Living With Water’ partnership includes stakeholders such as Yorkshire Water, Hull City Council, East Riding of Yorkshire, the Environment Agency and the
University of Hull, as well as global design and delivery company Stantec. Using the expertise of all the parties involved, alongside a range of digital tools and community consultation, the partnership has been able to restore floodplains, create wetlands and use sustainable draining systems to absorb and slow down rainwater runoff in the area.
Other green infrastructure elements such as green roofs, permeable pavements and bioswales mimicking natural processes allow rainwater to be absorbed into the ground, reducing surface runoff. As a result, the risk of flooding has been reduced.
A resilient future
Przydatek concludes: “Our Foresight review of resilience engineering highlights the importance of having critical infrastructures that can accommodate change. At Lloyd’s Register Foundation we have already awarded grants in excess of £10m in response to the review’s recommendations on growing capability and capacity in resilience.
“To ignore the changing climate when we build our new infrastructure will come at a social and economic cost in the future. We have too easily accepted that the destruction climate change brings is unpreventable. This doesn’t have to be the case. We have the potential and the solutions to build resiliently, but we need more concerted leadership and action.”
“To ignore the changing climate when we build our new infrastructure will come at a social and economic cost in the future” Jan Przydatek, Lloyd’s Register Foundation