Abstract
Managing urban flood risk is a key global challenge of the twenty-first century. Drivers of future UK flood risk were identified and assessed by the Flood Foresight project in 2002-2004 and 2008; envisaging flood risk during the 2050s and 2080s under a range of scenarios for climate change and socio-economic development. This paper qualitatively reassesses and updates these drivers, using empirical evidence and advances in flood risk science, technology and practice gained since 2008. Of the original drivers, five have strengthened, three have weakened and 14 remain within their 2008 uncertainty bands. Rainfall, as impacted by climate change, is the leading source driver of future urban flood risk. Intra-urban asset deterioration, leading to increases in a range of consequential flood risks, is the primary pathway driver. Social impacts (risk to life and health, and the intangible impacts of flooding on communities) and continued capital investment in buildings and contents (leading to greater losses when newer buildings of higher economic worth are inundated) have strengthened as receptor drivers of urban flood risk. Further, we propose two new drivers: loss of floodable urban spaces and indirect economic impacts, which we suggest may have significant impacts on future urban flood risk. This article is part of the theme issue 'Urban flood resilience'.
Highlights
Urban flooding is one of the key global challenges of the 21st Century, with future flood risk being exacerbated by climate change, urbanisation and ageing infrastructure
They associated each of these socio-economic scenarios with an appropriate future climate change scenario, drawn from those reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [16]
There is extensive literature on strategies to reduce flood risk associated with urbanisation that use Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) [23] and Blue-Green infrastructure (BGI) [24], as exemplified by current development of the Ebbsfleet Garden City [25]
Summary
Urban flooding is one of the key global challenges of the 21st Century, with future flood risk being exacerbated by climate change, urbanisation and ageing infrastructure. Flood Foresight used four pre-existing scenarios embodying different approaches to governance (centralised versus localised) and different values held by society (consumerist versus community) (Figure S2, Table S1) They associated each of these socio-economic scenarios with an appropriate future climate change scenario, drawn from those reported by the IPCC [16]. It is important to recognise that the impacts of drivers of river and coastal flooding identified in the original Flood Foresight study were disproportionately large in urban areas, compared with peri-urban and rural areas This is clear from inspection of maps showing the outcomes of quantitative evaluation of future, river and coastal flood risks performed using the Risk Assessment for Strategic Planning (RASP) tool (Figure S3). Recognising lack of knowledge concerning the intra-urban drivers, uncertainty bands were assigned to the drivers (Table S6)
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