Natural flood management: Interventions of the future
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Jon Hollis, Environment Agency NFM Programme Manager The Rivers Trust Conference 2017
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Natural flood management: Interventions of the future
- 1. Natural Flood Management; Interventions of the Future Jon Hollis Natural Flood Management Programme Manager 9 November 2017
- 2. 2 Interventions of the future • FCRM Challenges • Climate change • Flood and Coastal Risk reduction is at the receptors • Flood Risk funding • Community involvement • Longer term maintenance
- 3. Natural Flood Management Funding • £15m announced • Integrate NFM techniques in our 6 year programme • £13.4m at Catchment Scale • £1.6m Community lead 3
- 4. 4 The Aims • Reduction in Flood and Coastal Erosion risk • Improve habitats and increase biodiversity • Contribute to Research & Development; reducing the evidence gap for NFM • Promote partnership working
- 5. 5 Ministerial Involvement • Minister Coffey has been involved in the process • Her aspiration is that interventions are • Delivered at pace • Not over engineered • Community led • This is about testing interventions and drawing conclusions from the data
- 6. 6
- 7. Challenges • Appraising the interventions • We’re working on testing the interventions… we don’t have confidence yet • What is good enough? • Evaluating the interventions • What do we monitor? • How often? Where and when? • How long do we monitor for? 7
- 8. Opportunity • To be innovative • To be bold • To use judgement • To integrate delivery and outcomes • To understand how we deliver the interventions 8
- 9. Thank you NFM Inbox: NFM@environment- agency.gov.uk Jon Hollis: jon.hollis@envirionment- agency.gov.uk 9
Editor's Notes
- Introduce yourself – your role. Thank them for hosting
- Why call this presentation ‘interventions of the future’? There are a number of challenges facing Flood and Coastal Risk Management, and we need to prepare now to overcome them. A wise person once said, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get, what you always got… so we need to innovate to change our approach. The challenges we face are: Climate Change – Wetter winters, dryer summers and more intensive rain showers. Talk to a farmer in the East and they will say it was a dry year this year; farmers in Cumbria disagree with that. Where we put our interventions; generally we put our defences and assets near or next to the community they are benefiting. We’ve done this for many years, widening, strengthening channels in villages, towns and cities, with walls and flood storage areas around the towns or just upstream. We need to look more at the source of the flood water, than the places it impacts. Flood Risk Funding – we have a £2.5bn programme over 6 years and this is unprecedented for Flood and Coastal risk Management. However, the rules of Partnership funding mean that many projects need investment beyond that which central government provide. To truly deliver the best flood reduction for communities, we need communities to take an active role in the projects. Partnership Funding encourages that, but there is more we can do. We also need to have a plan for the operation and maintenance of the assets we build, use and rely on. This takes funding, and we should try to make the assets as passive as possible (relying less on people having to operate them) and try to reduce the need for maintenance. I think Natural Flood Management can help overcome these challenges. And that why we have a programme to test some of the interventions.
- Just after the Autumn Statement last year, the then Secretary of State for the Environment announce £15m to test Natural Flood Management interventions. This funding was part of the additional funding that Government Announced for Flood Risk in the March Budget of 2016, but Treasury wanted a plan from Defra and the Environment Agency before it was allocated. The funding is to integrate NFM techniques into our suite of measures to reduce flood and coastal erosion. Hopefully, we will be able to use more of them as stand alone or integrated with hard engineered solutions to give communities the best and most sustainable reduction in risk. Soon after the announcement Minister Coffey asked us to consider making some of the allocation available to local community groups; she suggested a figure of up to £1m, to be allocated at not more than £50,000 per project. Such was the response to the competition that we increased the £1m. However, this had to be found from the £15m. We have worked through a list of projects, and allocations to 58 projects were announced in July. The allocation is: £13.4m for the catchment scale programme £1.6m for the community scale programme
- As I’ve mentioned already, the overall aim of the investment in natural flood management is to have more confidence and be able to use these techniques in the future. Therefore each of the projects in the programme must help to meet 4 aims. Reduction in Flood and Coastal Erosion risk Improve habitats and increase biodiversity Contribute to Research & Development; reducing the evidence gap for NFM Promote partnership working
- Minister Coffey has been heavily involved in the process. One of the first things she asked for, following her reappointment as Minster for Flooding was an update on the NFM programme and the competition for the £1m allocation. She has made it quite clear that her aspiration is for these interventions to be Delivered at pace – she wants business cases written quickly so work can begin as soon as possible. Not over engineered – testing thing that we have some confidence in Community led – harnessing that local knowledge, energy and community spirit. And a reminder that this is about testing interventions and drawing conclusions from the data. Not all of the interventions will work as we hope they will, but so long as we know why they don’t work we can chose not to use them in the future.
- This map shows the spread of the 58 projects. I’d just say that there is a good spread of projects across the country, and while some areas look space on project numbers, they do have some significant investment. There are projects on the coast too, in Suffolk, Norfolk and Devon. These will help us to understand if and how we can make coastal defences for both flooding and coastal erosion more sustainable. This map is freely available on the CaBA website
- So there are lots of good things about the programme, but what are the challenges: There are a few. But at this stage, the big challenges are with the appraisal of the interventions. We’re in a catch 22 situation. We want to assess how likely the interventions will reduce risk, but we don’t have confidence in the assessment we have… and we have a duty to do that assessment to ensure we spend public money in the right way. We’ve given the project teams a framework of how they might assess the flood and coastal risk benefits, using tools we have as a basis, but we’ve not been specific as we don’t want to stifle their innovation. Current thinking, and we’ll be testing that too, suggests NFM will have the biggest impact on flooding up to the 3.3% probability of flooding in any year (that a 1:30 in old money). We’ve asked project teams to use ecosystem services to assess the wider benefits too. In many cases it’s right that we want to monetise these benefits, but as we don’t want to overstate benefits, what proportions would you use. The great thing about our appraisal though is that you don’t have to chose the option with the best benefit cost ratio, just the one that delivers the best outcome and has a score greater than 1:1 Benefit cost ratio. Monitoring is the second biggest challenge – I’ve mentioned already we need to baseline the data. But we also need to know what we will monitor, where and for how long. I think flow/ or level of water is almost a given, and some kind of environmental monitoring, but how when and where is important, and will be for the individual project teams to determine. We do have a number of academic and research organisations working on some of the projects and they will help with this. But we will need a long time for data collection to have the storms, surges, and rainfall to see how the interventions perform. And the launch of the evidence directory, case studies and potential maps Oliver mentioned will help teams too. These challenges will no doubt be overcome with community involvement and possibly funding too. The NFM funding ends in March 2021, and projects will need a plan for monitoring after that time.
- The challenges all feel like the NFM programme will be a struggle, but it really does open the door for us to think about flood and coastal risk reduction in a new way. We should be innovative, and not stifled by what we’ve always done. Maybe we can continue to build hard defences around communities, but with some forest up stream the walls will last longer and not need to be adapted for climate change? We can be bold, take calculated risks that the interventions will work. We don’t have cart blanch to install anything anywhere, but we do have an opportunity to try new things and we should feel empowered by that. We can use our judgment, we don’t have the answers up front, if we did we wouldn’t have this programme, so we must use judgment where we don’t have the evidence yet. We should integrate delivery, Flood risk can benefit the environment and increase biodiversity. It can also support and help navigation; and get people out in the environment. But each of those can benefit flood risk too, so we must work with others who have an interest in the catchments and coast to deliver multiple benefits, for less money than each would have put in alone. And the NFM programme provides an opportunity not only to see if the interventions work on the ground to reduce risk, but how they are best delivered and by whom. If we want NFM to be part of the suite of measures we use to manage Flood and coastal risk, we must learn how to manage them.
- So in summary, there are challenges facing Flood and Coastal Risk Management in general, and the NFM programme could be the key to unlock some interventions of the future. Thank you for listening. Questions?