Hazard
This can be reduced by flood defences and management schemes. We should gradually change the emphasis from hard engineering solutions to more sustainable, low maintenance soft solutions, such as wet lands and river restoration. Do we really want our river banks and coasts covered in concrete? We should be working with nature instead of against it, and create more areas for wild life. Some ideas for what could be done are shown below:

•  614,000ha of land lies below sea level, much of it in the Fens in East Anglia . The Fens are no longer such a rich source of arable land as the peat dries out and blows away. Since drainage started in earnest some 350 years ago, some parts have sunk by 10 metres to well below sea level, and require continuous pumping to drain them. Why not return parts of them to their natural state?

•  Many properties are damaged by flood due to changes in agricultural practices. Local planning authorities have little or no control over these. Farmers should be encouraged or subsidised to adopt practices, such as planting hedges and digging ditches, designed to reduce surface water run off, and even to use their land as flood storage and wetlands. In other words they should be paid to "farm water" as part of an integrated catchment management policy.

This is already being done, with considerable success, in certain parts of the country. For example, in Aberdeenshire, farmers are being encouraged by the council, with the help of pressure from local residents, to "recontour" riverside fields and remove flood banks voluntarily to allow their fields to flood. In recognition and support of this pioneering work, the council was recently awarded substantial funding under the EU's "Interreg III" North Sea initiative, which has already seen partnerships develop between Germany and the Netherlands and between Wales and Ireland to address issues in common, such as flooding. In the Highland Council area, an important EU funded project being run by the Forestry Commission, is reducing flood hazards using soft flood defences such as timber and recycled materials under the EU's "Strategies and Actions/Implementations for Flood Emergency Risk Management" (SAFER) initiative. This initiative is now operating successfully in Ireland , Germany and Switzerland , as well as Scotland .

•  There should be more use of Relief Rivers and detention basins to carry surplus water away during a storm event. These should not be constructed of concrete unless absolutely necessary, but should be made to look as natural as possible, using techniques pioneered by the River Restoration Centre.

•  There should be a greater use of water supply and hydroelectric reservoirs to store flood water. Summer droughts, the need to replace or upgrade old reservoirs to cope with the increased risk factors from climate change, and the move towards renewable energy is likely to increase the need for such reservoirs anyway. However, it is important that they are built in a safe and environmentally friendly way.

•  Tidal Barrages and wave power should be in widespread use, and could have a dual function of energy supply and storm surge control. Already there are well-developed plans to increase wave energy capacity around the world, and many schemes are due to come to fruition next year. A recent independent assessment for the UK's Department of Trade and Industry indicated that on current technology, wave power costs have fallen so much that for an investment of €750 billion they could produce as much as all the world's large scale hydro electric schemes put together.

•  Legislation to transpose the Water Framework Directive in England and Wales should be amended as it has been in Scotland to adopt a holistic approach that includes consideration of flood issues. At present the legislation only applies to water quality and natural environment issues, with no consideration of the possible adverse effects on the built environment.

•  New drainage systems in Britain are still being designed for the two to five year rainfall event, despite climate change projections and the suffering caused by sewage surcharge. For new developments, local authorities should insist on a Drainage Impact Assessment following the pioneering guidance notes prepared by the North East Scotland Flood Appraisal Group. These guidelines are increasingly being followed by local authorities in Scotland and include the requirement for sensitivity testing for the 200-year event. Similar sensitivity analysis should be applied to existing combined sewers to ensure that overflows are managed in such a way as to avoid damage to land or property and upgrading should be applied in a rolling programme. Such a programme could include one way flap valves to prevent sewage backup into toilets and baths, and "sewage paths" to direct surcharges into roads and detention tanks or basins rather than gardens and houses. Where the costs of upgrading are too high to be economically justified, then incentives should be given to people to move to new locations, as it can often be cheaper to build new houses than to upgrade a sewer system and treatment works.

•  Ofwat restrictions on how much the water companies are allowed to spend on sewage upgrading should be reviewed.

•  The extent of the flood hazard should be made clearer to the general public. The Scottish Planning Guideline, NPPG 7, recommended that where appropriate, planners should impose conditions that suitable permanent signs are erected warning that the area is susceptible to flooding. In Australia , every flood hazard area has signs showing that the area is likely to flood and the level the flood waters could reach. While it has been known for people to pull down these signs when they want to sell their houses, in general it would go some way to ensuring that house buyers were aware of the hazard. If new housing estates had to display such signs, especially beside show houses and sales offices, this would help to inform prospective buyers.

•  Dams and raised reservoirs should no longer be exempted from the Control of Major Accident Hazard Regulations 1999 (COMAH), so that emergency contingency plans can be produced, and more information made available in the public domain. Indeed one of the outcomes of The Freedom of Information Act which implements the Aarhus Convention may be that dam owners will be obliged to release hitherto secret information. There should be a concentrated effort to fit all dams and raised reservoir embankments with satellite reflectors or transponders to take full advantage of PS InSAR technology to monitor them for safety.

•  There is a desperate need for better flood maps in the public domain. Countries around the world are baffled that several insurance comp ani es in Britain have better flood maps than the government. Britain has one of the best academic communities in the world, why could they not be mobilised to improve flood mapping and modelling for the benefit of society as a whole? The Natural Environment Research Council seems to be preoccupied with pure science and biology in the way it selects research projects for grant aid from the taxpayer. This is all very well, but if a tenth of its budget were set aside for five years for practical flood hazard mapping projects, then perhaps the government could start to catch up with the insurance industry. (in 2003, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council posted an announcement of opportunity on their web site for research work on flooding and even before the posting was made, they were swamped with enquiries from researchers. Unfortunately none of the successful bids has any great relevance to insurers.) Much useful work has been done by the CEH and HR in Wallingford , the FHRC in Middlesex, and the ESSC in Reading for example, but such institutions each have to devote valuable time to bidding for limited research contracts to produce piecemeal solutions, or pilot studies. A concentrated and co-ordinated effort is needed by engineering consultants, universities and research institutes to produce a national set of flood maps with high quality dynamic models so that the public can have a much better picture of where the flood hazard lies. Perhaps in this way, public domain flood hazard maps and models might become as accurate as those held by major insurers and reinsurers, even if many wheels have to be reinvented. In Canada , the government response to the Red River floods was to establish a detailed LiDAR survey linked to three-dimensional dynamic modelling. The author has met with the researchers involved and they would be happy to share information with researchers in the UK . This would be a good starting point.

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