17May 2021
Defra/Environment Agency Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management R&D Programme, focused on working with communities, now published

CEP was commissioned by Defra & the Environment Agency to develop a Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management (FCERM) R&D programme, focused on working with communities, which has now been published

CEP in partnership with Flood Hazard Research Centre (FHRC) Middlesex University and HR Wallingford (HRW) was commissioned to develop a Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management (FCERM) Research & Development (R&D) Framework focussed on Working with Communities.  The aim was to take a strategic view of research in this area to enable a clear programme of research to be planned for the next five years. This included conducting a detailed literature review, identifying research gaps, and setting out 12 priority areas for future research. These outputs will be used by the Defra/Environment Agency FCERM R&D programme to shape existing and future research projects and to prioritise their research funding. The outputs can be found in the following reports:

The Working with Communities research and development framework has three aims:

  • To improve institutions’ understanding of how communities, RMAs and other organisations can work together to improve resilience and adapt in the face of the increased risk of flooding and coastal erosion caused by climate change (Institutions)

  • To evaluate and support improvements in the effectiveness of working together on flood and coastal erosion risk management from the perspectives of communities, RMAs and other organisations (for example, NGOs) (Effectiveness)

  • To support the development of more comprehensive approaches to participation that recognise that the capacity of different communities to become involved in flood and coastal erosion risk management will vary (Community capacity)

The framework is structured around six flood and coastal erosion risk management activities and five research questions:

Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management activities

  1. Management of flood risk assets

  2. Preparation for, response to and recovery from incidents

  3. Participation in decisions, designs and funding for schemes

  4. Preparation and adaptation of homes to reduce flood impacts

  5. Participation in conversations about long term adaptation

Research questions

  1. To what extent and in what ways are members of the public participating in the six topic areas across all sources of flood and coastal erosion?

  2. What are the barriers and facilitators to members of the public participating in the six topic areas across all sources of flood and coastal erosion?

  3. What approaches/models of participation encourage/discourage members of the public participating in the six topic areas across all sources of flood and coastal erosion?

  4. What types of governance and institutional arrangements facilitate or inhibit members of the public’s participation in the six topic areas across all sources of flood and coastal erosion? 

  5. What are the costs and benefits (to communities and RMAs) of members of the public participating in the six topic areas across all sources of flood and coastal erosion?

The literature review showed that for each of the FCERM activities and research questions there were few instances of extensive past research which address all the research questions. The two areas with the greatest strength of evidence were Incident management (Activity 2) and Managing land (Activity 4) with Participation in decisions and designs for schemes (Activity 3).  

Once the gaps had been reviewed 12 outline proposals for projects to fill the gaps were developed. Fig 1 shows the titles of those projects and how they link to the aims of the framework:

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

For more information contact Dr Clare Twigger-Ross (Technical Director) or Rolands Sadauskis (Project Manager).

Team CEP
10Jul 2019
CEP at the XV International Congress of Environmental Psychology 2019

DR CLARE TWIGGER-ROSS (CEP) PRESENTING KEYNOTE PAPER AT THE XV CONGRESO DE PSICOLOGIA AMBIENTAL-PSICAMB 2019 IN TENERIFE.

Dr Clare Twigger-Ross is giving a keynote talk on Tuesday 16th July at the XV Congreso de Psicologia Ambiental-PSCIAMB: Community, resources and sustainability: the challenge of territories. She will be presenting her paper Building resilience capacities of communities to flood risk: reflections on theory and practice in the UK. The paper draws on research that CEP and associates have carried out for Defra and the Environment Agency over the past decade.  

The conference is being held at the University of la Laguna, Tenerife from 16th – 19th July 2019.

For more information please contact Dr Clare Twigger-Ross (Technical Director).

Building resilience capacities of communities to flood risk: reflections on theory and practice in the UK

Summary:

Climate change will increase the frequency, severity and extent of flooding in the UK with the present 1.8 million people living in areas at significant flood risk predicted to rise to 2.6 million under a 2° scenario and to 3.3 million under a 4° scenario (CCRA, 2017). The health and social impacts of floods have been documented over a number of years (e.g. Walker et al, 2005; Tapsell and Tunstall, 2008) with recent robust studies on the effects on mental health (e.g. Public Health England, 2017;Miljevic et al, 2017) showing the impact to be quite considerable.   Given these negative social impacts it becomes even more important to understand how communities and individuals alongside local professionals (e.g. local authorities, emergency services) might be able to improve or develop greater community resilience. Dr Twigger-Ross together with her colleagues at Collingwood Environmental Planning has been working on projects for the UK government and its agencies since 2005 on aspects of flooding and this paper draws on that work within the framework of community resilience.   Community resilience is a way of thinking about resilience to flooding at a local and place based level, understanding that there will be multiple communities and social networks intersecting in a given flood risk area.  In this paper Cutter et al’s (2010) disaster resilience of place is drawn on to locate  community resilience which is defined as a “set of capacities that can be fostered through interventions and policies, which in turn help  build and enhance a community’s ability to respond, recover  from [and adapt] to disasters”(Cutter et al, 2010).   The capacities examined by Twigger-Ross et al, (2015) are institutional resilience capacities, social resilience capacities, community capital, infrastructure resilience capacities and economic resilience capacities and they will be elaborated on within this paper.  Importantly, in order to meet the challenges of climate change the type of resilience will need to focus on the proactive/transformative type of resilience rather than the reactive/defensive type of resilience.   A number of active interventions have been developed in the UK by to improve levels of resilience capacity, through government and charity funding, together with grassroots interventions emergent after a flood and the factors for their success or otherwise will be discussed in relation to the community resilience framework. Further, it is recognised that the concept of resilience is both complex and contested, not just the opposite of vulnerability and the paper will comment on that, specifically in the context of its use by UK government and its agencies.  Finally, the role and impact of “contract” research and the position of researchers within that will be examined through the paper.

Team CEP
7Jun 2019
CEP at Flood & Coast 2019 conference

Dr Clare Twigger-Ross (CEP) a panel member at the 2019 Flood and Coast conference.

Dr Clare Twigger-Ross will be presenting, on 18 June 2019, a short paper on community resilience to flooding at the 2019 Conference panel session Climate change – how do we overcome the physical, political & societal barriers to meet the challenge.  The other members of the panel are:  

Flood.jpg

Convened by the Environment Agency, the Flood & Coast conference 2019 is a unique event that advances the debate about flood and coast erosion risk, resilience and response between government bodies and local authorities with business, major infrastructure and asset managers, as well as affected communities. 

For more information please contact Dr Clare Twigger-Ross (Technical Director).

Team CEP