Losing to Win - Facing down the Floods

Flood management in the future means accepting that flooding will happen and putting measures in place for quick recovery.

Flood management in the future means accepting that flooding will happen and putting measures in place for quick recovery.

Designing for resilience and adaptation has become the norm but now the word on everyone's lips in the flooding field is "acceptance". The next 50 to 100 years are going to be about learning to live with rising waters in a changing climate.

That means general acceptance from public and politicians that floods will happen and putting in place measures to allow quick recovery. On the coast there is a starker future for people in some communities, who will have to accept that their homes will disappear under rising seas.

As Environment Agency chief executive Sir James Bevan said in a speech in March: "On the coast, while we will want to hold the line against erosion wherever possible, affordable and desirable, we have to recognise that in places it won't be."

The question that has to be asked, he said, is: "Do we want to defend every inhabited location or should we consider permanently moving some communities which are at the highest risk?"

The problems of England's crumbling east coast are well known but it is in North Wales where Britain's first climate refugees – the people having to get to grips with acceptance right now – are facing the realities of a predicted 1m rise in sea levels over the next century. The village of Fairbourne in Gwynedd, on the estuary of the river Mawdach, has only decades left before it will be under the waves, according to the most thorough technical projections, and the community has been told it needs to move out over the next 40 years.

Click here to read the full article from the September publication of 'New Civil Engineer'