Journal of Flood Risk Management

Abstract

The traditional disciplinary boundaries between the various professionals with a stake in flood risk management tend to be an obstacle to the promotion and adoption of integrated approaches. Planners, engineers, environmental scientists and government officials are recognizing that they need to work together to deliver sustainable solutions to the challenges that flooding poses. Last year in the United Kingdom we formed the Inter-Institutional Panel on Flooding to promote a more integrated multidisciplinary response to flood risk. This group consists of the main professional bodies concerned with the Built Environment, namely the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Landscape Institute, the Royal Town Planning Institute, the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management and the Royal United Services Institute (who are concerned with security and emergency planning). They have decided to work together because they share a common concern that flood risk management may not be moving forward in the most sustainable way and that urban areas may be left unnecessarily exposed to flood impacts in the future. Their aim has been to develop a joint policy for flood risk management with a view to influencing governments and their own professional members. At the moment the policy has been developed at a high level, but it has been agreed by all the parties that: the approach to flood risk management should shift from a reliance on flood defences to a holistic management of risk, combining engineered protection against floods with measures to alleviate the impact of floods. Flood risk reduction measures should include both active measures (physical defences, drains, sewers, changes to building and urban design), passive measures (multifunctional green space that can also act as water storage, planting of grass and trees to increase water infiltration to soil, reinstatement of flood plains) and emergency management measures (flood warnings, emergency management plans, recovery plans); structural measures, particularly flood protection works, should avoid disconnecting one part of a community from another and should preserve visual (and where possible physical) continuity between the community and rivers and coastline. They should also avoid exacerbating flood risk in other areas; flood risk reduction management measures should be compatible with measures to manage water pollution and with the sustainable management of the whole water cycle; where practical, surface water should be managed on the surface; urban areas should be designed to provide adequate surface pathways to convey excess flow safely during extreme events. This includes the need to make adequate space between buildings and to design roads, open space and pathways to act as flood conveyance channels; buildings in flood risk areas should be designed and constructed to be resistant to flooding and should use flood resilient construction methods and materials. This should also apply to building refurbishment; the introduction of flood risk reduction measures should be used as an opportunity to improve urban environments, avoiding the drawbacks of many traditional responses, which have helped create unappealing and unsafe urban space. Many of the aspects of this policy will not be new to readers as they have been practised effectively in many countries for a number of years. But the overall concept of placing flood risk management at the heart of urban design is one worth reiterating. It recognizes the importance of urban design in creating a good space in which to live. Too often have we let our desire for building flood defences create a landscape devoid of interest, connectivity or human scale. Creating space for surface floodwater to be safely conveyed between buildings during extreme events can of course conflict with the economic need to place new development close to river corridors and maximize the building density. Paying for buildings and infrastructure that are resistant and resilient to flooding is often considered unaffordable in economies that focus on short-term gains at the expense of longer-term investment. These conflicts occur as much in the slum communities in the developing world as they do in the cities of developed countries. We need to face up to and resolve these conflicts. As many of the papers published in this journal illustrate, in the long term the cost of flood damage often far outweighs the investment needed to manage flood risk. To communicate these messages to decision makers the Inter-Institutional Panel is promoting a series of public lectures across the United Kingdom to coincide with campaigns within their own member organizations. The panel is also cataloguing case studies from around the world that demonstrate best practice. Here the objectives of the panel align exactly with the objectives of this journal. Through the pages of the journal we can all learn from the experiences of those far-sighted practitioners that have sought to break away from traditional ideas to foster new and innovative approaches. I encourage all of those practitioners to put pen to paper and share their experiences with us so that the lessons they have learnt may be spread across the globe.