Image:‘Water over river rocks‘ by Rob Barber on Flickr (CC by 2.00)

Defra publishes CEP’s report on Flood Resilience Community Pathfinder

CEP’s Final Report of the evaluation of Defra’s Flood Resilience Community Pathfinder (FRCP) scheme in England has now been published.  The report and further information about both the Pathfinder Scheme and the evaluation can be found here.

The FRCP scheme consisted of thirteen partnership projects across England, involving local governments and other organisations such as voluntary sector groups, Environment Agency etc.   The pathfinder scheme was designed to enable and stimulate communities at significant or greater risk[1] of flooding to work in partnership with these kinds of organisation to develop innovative local solutions that:

• Enhanced flood risk management and awareness in ways which quantifiably improved the community’s overall resilience to flooding.
• Demonstrably improved the community’s financial resilience in relation to flooding.
• Delivered sustained improvements with the potential to be applied in other areas.

The evaluation was carried out over the entire pathfinder period and reported on the progress made by the individual projects and on the results and impacts of the scheme, identifying lessons for building community resilience in the future.

The evaluation built on Cutter et al.’s (2010) model for categorising community resilience capacities/resources and discussed the pathfinder project interventions in terms of the five resilience categories: social, institutional, infrastructure, economic and community capital.

[1] Based on flood risk categories used in the UK National Flood Risk Assessment, significant risk equates to a one in 75 chance of flooding from rivers or the sea in any given year.