Abstract
Despite improvements in the management of flood risk and the introduction of new regulations, losses from flooding remain high. An important driver is the continuation of new assets being built in flood prone locations. Over the last decade over 120 000 new homes in England and Wales have been built in flood prone areas. While the yearly rates of new homes in flood risk areas have increased only moderately on the national level, significant differences between and within regions as well as between different flood types exist. Using property level data on new homes built over the last decade and information on the socio-economic development of neighbourhoods, we analyse spatial clusters of disproportional increase in flood exposure from recently built homes and investigate how these patterns evolve under different future climate scenarios. We find that a disproportionately higher number of homes built in struggling or declining neighbourhoods between 2008 and 2018 is expected to end up in areas at a high risk of flooding over their lifetime as a result of climate change. Based on these findings, we discuss issues regarding future spending on flood defences, affordability of private level flood protection and insurance as well as the role of spatial planning for adaptation in the face of climate change.
Highlights
Flood risk is commonly understood as a function of hazard, exposure and vulnerability and can be altered through de- or increasing any of the three components [1]
Not taking these trade-offs into account by not considering the systemlevel resilience of communities they are built in, in a forward looking way, can jeopardise the long-term sustainability of entire neighbourhoods. This applies to cases in which asset-level engineering resilience is the main strategy to ensure long-term sustainability as the relevant property-level measures might be attenuated or waived during the planning process to not threaten the economic viability and affordability of new property developments or might become less effective in case of changing hazards under climate change (CC) [24]. We address this lack of evidence on the long-term effects of recent increases in flood exposure in the context of community resilience for the example of England and Wales by investigating (a) where new homes have been built between 2008 and 2018 in England and Wales geographically and over time, (b) how they are contributing to the current and future flood risk of their neighbourhoods, and (c) how the socio-economic development of the neighbourhoods they have been built in might affect their resilience to flooding under changing flood hazards as a result of CC
The change in the flood risk by the 2050s as a result of CC is estimated for the different flood types across England and Wales based on three CC scenarios as defined by the UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) [38]: a lower end scenario based on a 2◦ change in global mean temperature (GMT) (2C), a 4 ◦C change (4C) and a worst case scenario (H++) which does not refer to a specific GMT, but is considered a credible high end change scenario
Summary
Flood risk is commonly understood as a function of hazard, exposure and vulnerability and can be altered through de- or increasing any of the three components [1]. One component to manage floods in an riskbased approach is to avoid increases in exposure by shifting development to areas with the lowest flood risk probability [32] In this context the Planning Policy Guidance Note 25 (PPG25) was introduced in 2001 in England and Wales making the environment agency a statutory consultee on applications for planning permissions in flood risk areas [33]1. This should ensure that local planning authorities, who are largely independent in setting their local development plans, only permit new property developments in areas at risk of flooding if no other options are available, the sustainable benefits out weight the increase in flood risk and that the new property developments are both resilient (i.e. asset-level engineering resilience) and resistant to flooding [35]. While the planning system stipulates that new buildings should only been built in accordance with requirements to ensure their current and future (engineering) resilience to flooding, there are no nation-wide data sets available to monitor whether these requirements are met
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