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Flooding is one of the UK's biggest risks, and changes to our climate with predictions of warmer, wetter and stormier winters will increase the risk further. The Environment Agency's National Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy for England (2020) sets out ambitions to create climate resilience places and infrastructure for today's and tomorrow's climate. It works to the vision of 'a nation ready for, and resilient to, flooding and coastal change — today, tomorrow and to the year 2100'. Among many objectives set out, the strategy commits risk management authorities to mainstream the use and take-up of property flood resilience (PFR) — that is, those measures that aim to reduce the amount of water entering a property, and those adaptations that can be made to reduce damage if it does enter. The PFR sector has evolved over the last decade with varying success, limited uptake and perceptions of 'failure' through poor workmanship and an absence of guidance. In 2021 a new Code of Practice (CoP) was published, providing guidance on six standards: hazard assessment, property survey, options development, construction, commissioning and handover, and operation and maintenance. This paper explores the objective of the Code, its benefits and limitation, highlighting that while the Code remains voluntary, growing awareness and application by risk management authorities such as the Environment Agency (EA) and lead local flood authorities will help drive up standards. Consistent delivery to acceptable standards will meet homeowner and insurer needs, thereby building a body of evidence of successful delivery and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The last ten years have witnessed increasing levels of concern and public debate about the risks associated with environmental hazards such as flooding in the UK and the likelihood that these will increase in frequency due to anthropogenic climate change. In this paper, we argue that attempts to mitigate this process through a focus on individualised risk communication and behavioural change are unlikely to be successful, given the epistemic conflicts surrounding climate change knowledges in public discourse. In response, we argue for an alternative framework for developing environmental knowledges, using social learning to promote both epistemic re-alignment and a re-scaling of environmental governance that promotes enablement. We use insights from research on flooding in South West England to highlight the ways in which traditional policy approaches such as behavioural change have come to be so overbearing in public debate on environmental hazards management. In contrast, we demonstrate the potential for a re-scaling of environmental governance to reconfigure climate change knowledge and build new spaces for enablement to reduce hazard vulnerability at the place-based community scale. We argue that this has major epistemological and practical implications for the ways that researchers and policy makers work with publics to reduce hazard risk under a changing climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is unequivocal evidence that global sea levels are rising. It is therefore inevitable there will be socioeconomic impacts as a result of this. To aid mitigation, and the implementation of adaptation measures, it is vital the magnitude of the potential impact is quantified. Current approaches in the UK make simplifying assumptions regarding the relationship between present-day and future economic damage relating to coastal flood risk. The analysis undertaken here supports studies of an improved impact of sea level rise by providing national-scale estimates of changes in wave overtopping rates and flood defence overflow rates, as a result of different amounts of sea level rise. The analysis involves the application of components of an existing risk-based coastal flood risk analysis method. A subset of almost 600 flood defence assets around the country has been analysed for sea level rise rates up to 1 m. The resulting analysis shows that, on average, the wave overtopping rate increases by up to 150 times above present-day rates for lower return periods and by up to five times for higher return periods. This differential arises as a result of non-linearities in overtopping rates with increasing extreme sea levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Environment Agency in England is investing £2.5 billion with the aim of reducing flood risk to at least 300,000 homes by 2020/21. Several of the schemes being considered are on rivers that have experienced an upsurge of flooding over recent years. Decisions on whether to invest and how high to build are usually made on the basis of stationary methods of flood frequency analysis that assume the probability of flood flows is unchanging over time. Following successive severe floods in Cumbria, trend tests and non‐stationary flood frequency analysis techniques have been applied. These allow parameters of the frequency distribution to change over time or with some other covariate. The resulting estimates of flow, for the present day, were up to 55% higher than the stationary estimates at river gauges in north‐west England. The results have been incorporated into the scheme appraisal process. A national analysis indicates that there is evidence of upward trends in peak flows at nearly a quarter of river flow gauges across Great Britain. Many rivers show an abrupt increase in flood flows in the late 1990s. Trends tend to occur in upland areas but they are also seen on some rivers across south‐east England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]