Climate change and flooding
Climate change increases both the frequency and intensity of flood events. This is because when the temperature rises it enables the atmosphere to hold greater levels of water vapour, which in turn leads to heavier and/or more sustained periods of rainfall. Increasing temperatures further causes melting polar regions, causing sea level rises and therefore threatening coastal cities and ecosystems across the world. Additional factors contributing to the rise in flooding are the removal of vegetation and changes to existing land cover.
Flooding has dramatic impacts to the lives of people affected by them, causing loss of housing, infrastructure and life. In the longer-term, unpredictable weather patterns can lead to the loss of farming land and create lasting economic problems.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated that there is high confidence that flooding, particularly winter flooding will be an increasing trend in Europe.
Traditional flood protection measures, known as grey infrastructure, are not alone sufficient at coping with the risk of flooding. This is because grey infrastructure has been designed with a specific threshold in mind and therefore has an inherent likelihood of failure. Grey infrastructure could also provide a false sense of security, which can lead to increases in the area of land at risk of flooding. Both of these factors ultimately increase flood vulnerability and flood hazard.
Traditional ‘grey infrastructure’
- Man made solutions
- Constructed assets such as, channels, dikes, ditches, dams, sewers, pipes, sewage treatment plants
- Watertight – although modern grey infrastructure can be permeable leading to better run-off and infiltration
- Designed to stop ecosystems growing on them
Nature-based solutions, such as Natural Water Retention Measures (NWRM), are promising options to complement grey infrastructure in mitigating flood risks. They not only serve to reduce flooding, but also support and provide additional ecosystem services e.g. increased biodiversity and recreation opportunities. However, a common characteristic of green infrastructure measures is that they often need to use more land than traditional grey methods.
Green infrastructure serves the interests of both people and nature
The core underlying principle of green infrastructure is that the same area of land can offer multiple benefits. Green infrastructure further helps to restore natural ecosystems through land management and through engineering measures which use soils, vegetation and other natural materials to improve natural water retention. This limits the load on wastewater management systems, whilst encouraging biodiversity.
Green infrastructure can provide job opportunities and high level of return of investment, as well as being cost-effective alternative or complementary to grey infrastructure. However, there are many challenges associated with the implementation of green infrastructure, particularly as most Natural Water Retention Measures (NWRM) need to be implemented on private land.
Issues that need to be considered include how to compensate for or incentivise land use for flood retention and how public subsidies will work in practice. There is also the question of how to navigate property rights when dealing with temporary flooding on private land and how to ensure the willing involvement of private landowners.
Green infrastructure
- Infiltration, run-off and purification
- Green roofs, permeable pavements, downspout disconnections
- At the city level, green infrastructure mimicking nature supports urban drainage systems through water retention and detention, and by creating biodiversity promotion e.g. by building fish ladders
- At the regional scale, green infrastructure provides habitats and, flood protection, as well as contributing to cleaner air and water.
Introducing Land4Flood
LAND4FLOOD is a European research network that has been focusing on the relationship between people, land and floods, in order to better prepare for future flooding events.
The Natural Flood Retention on Private Land, COST Action (LAND4FLOOD), started in 2017, having identified the need for reconciliation between flood risk management and land management. The Action, which involved 34 different COST countries, aimed to establish a common knowledge base and build effective channels of communication between scientists, regulators, landowners and other stakeholders in the field.
The Action roots go back to 2013, when Dr Thomas Hartmann, now the Vice Chair of LAND4FLOOD, helped organise a summer school in Utrecht, in the Netherlands for professors and PhD students. During this week-long event, he and the other participants explored the challenges of water and land governance. A year later, Prof. Lenka Slaviková, now Action Chair, responded to a call from the Czech Ministry of Education for networking projects, which became known as cross-border flood risk management (CrossFlood). This bringing together of different disciplines and researchers from many countries helped to bring the previously little discussed topic of land and flood risk management (FRM) into a cohesive proposal for COST Action funding, thus placing the subject on both the academic and the political agenda.
Key Questions posed by the Action:
- Which synergies can be identified between different land uses and the provision of flood storage and ecosystem services?
- How can the knowledge base about advantages and potentials of NWRM, large scale flood retention and resilient cities be strengthened and their importance communicated to different actors at the local, regional and catchment levels?
- How can land owners be encouraged to adapt land uses and land management strategies which allow for increased water retention capacity on their land?
- How can public and private stakeholders in urban and rural areas engage with each other to reduce flood damage through comprehensive management plans based on the implementation of detention, retention and resilience measures throughout the catchment?
The Action was organised into three Working Groups to allow participants and stakeholders to focus on particular topics of interest.
WG1 – Environmental conditions: The effects of land on catchment hydrology
WG2 – Socio-political contexts: Property rights, opportunities and limitations for negotiating land for flood risk management
WG3 – Stakeholders and interests: Negotiating and mobilizing processes to secure land for flood risk management
Working with stakeholders: who, how and why?
Research coordination was an important aspect of the Action, to emphasize the promotion of both existing and new instruments for improved land and flood management use. The Action has looked at the practical applicability of various instruments in different institutional contexts, such as authoritative vs democratic governance.
Capacity building
The Action focused on capacity building activities, with a key emphasis on encouraging the uptake of new transdisciplinary knowledge by policy makers and decision takers, which would help to highlight the correlations between alternative land uses and consequences for flood damage. Another part of the capacity building strategy was to raise landowners’ awareness to the problems and solutions associated with flooding and to gain their support for the implementation of nature-based solutions.
Education was another important element of LAND4FLOODs capacity building strategy. The Action has been particularly keen to support researchers at the beginning of their career by offering interdisciplinary education opportunities such as Short Term Scientific Missions to PhD and post-doc students from fields such as, water engineers, environmental scientists, planners, economists and more. A substantial number of early career investigators were also directly involved in the Action.
Since its earliest days, researchers from the Action have been prolifically busy raising awareness of issues related to flooding and land management. Members of the Action have spoken at numerous conferences related to water research, planning laws, and civil engineering, and they have continued doing so, despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The Action also became part of a Network of Networks, working closely and sharing research with 12 other networks, including The International Water Resources Association (IWRA), Natural Water Retention Measures (NWRM) and the International Academic Association on Planning Law and Property Rights (PLPR).
LAND4FLOOD in the media
Costing the Earth – Flooding Britain – BBC Sounds
Publications
Next to a substantial number of collaboratively written academic articles, special issues and books by members of the COST Action, LAND4FLOOD has also reached out to policymakers, practitioners, landowners and citizens in dedicated webinars and policy briefs. These policy briefs are produced in collaboration with the International Water Resource Association (IWRA) and are available beyond the COST Action.
Two books stand out as major outcomes of the COST Action:
‘Nature-Based Flood Risk Management on Private Land, Disciplinary Perspectives on a Multidisciplinary Challenge’, published as an Open Access publication in 2019, presents
“Experiences across North-west and Central Europe addressing differing contextual and implementation approaches within a range of topographies and scales. This volume includes examples of nature-based FRM from Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Netherlands and Poland. Scales vary from small and local retention measures with narrow ownership structures up to the catchment level, where planning and wider stakeholder engagement challenges implementation (see the cases from Austria or Germany). All the cases express specific local complexities and are highly contextual. However, broad questions can be identified that cut across the cases supported by the reflections of the expert commentators on each case.”
Thomas Hartmann, Lenka Slavíková, Simon McCarthy, Editors
The book ‘Spatial Flood Risk Management, Implementing Catchment-based Retention and Resilience on Private Land‘ presents the main findings of LAND4FLOOD. A special feature of this open access publication from 2022 is that each chapter of this volume is collaboratively written by teams of authors of at least two member states. Centralising the role of land and landowners, Spatial Flood Risk Management brings together knowledge from socio-economy, public policy, hydrology, geomorphology, and engineering to establish an interdisciplinary knowledge base on spatial approaches to managing flood risks.
The Actions final conference entitled ‘Towards Spatial Flood Risk Management!’ was held online on 27 January 2022. At the end of the meeting an independent academic network on LAND4FLOOD was launched and the network that thrived under the COST Action funding continues to collaborate. LAND4FLOOD meets again in September 2023 in Dortmund and plans to continue with annual conferences.
Find more information and join in on www.land4flood.eu !
Further information
