Environmental change indicators for flood and coastal defence

A project to identify what changes in the environment might alter flood risk, bringing together long-term data to suggest some pilot indicators.

From:
Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Research and Development Programme and Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs
Published
12 February 2021
Category:
Understanding risks from all sources of flooding
Topics:
Asset performance, Big data, Climate change, Coast, Flood forecasting, Flood risk assessment, Hydrology, Meteorology, Understanding physical processes
Project status:
Completed
Project code:
FD2311
Date of completion:
31 October 2002

Documents

Environmental change indicators relevant to flood management and coastal defence - final report (45KB) WORD

Environmental change indicators relevant to flood management and coastal defence - summary (112KB) WORD

Environmental change indicators relevant to flood management and coastal defence - technical report (1.4MB) PDF

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Details

Changes in the environment are important to the flood defence industry because they may alter the risk of floods and how well the existing protection works. The public focus is naturally on examples where flood risk is increased by changes. However, in some cases changes alter the safety margin of flood protection measures and actually lower the risk of flooding.

This project identified a wide range of possible Environmental Change Indicators (ECIs) for England and Wales related to floods. This also included collections of data from sufficiently long periods to make the ECI calculations valid. These could then be used to produce a small number of pilot indicators which would be useful for flood defence planners and managers.

The project started in 2001 and was completed in 2002 at a cost of £52,657.

Published 12 February 2021
Contents