PROPOSAL

The Evaluation Of The Performance Of Source Control Measures

[Name of the Institute]The Evaluation Of The Performance Of Source Control Measures

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Flooding has long been recognized as one of the UK's most damaging and costly natural hazards (e.g. Newson 1975; Handmer 1987; Purseglove 1988), with a long history of ?ooding from both tidal and ?uvial sources (e.g. Law et al. 1998; Lamb 1991). It is increasingly accepted that such events may become more frequent and severe in the future, as a result of climate change and sea level rise (e.g. Environment Agency 2001), together with land use changes and urban development.

However, determining the precise effects of these changes remains difficult in practical (policy) terms. In the UK, ?ood management policy has traditionally favored technological solutions to hazard reduction and focused primarily on the construction of hard-engineered defenses, yet the long-term sustainability of ?ood defenses must be questioned in the light of climate change and ?oodplain development pressures.

Furthermore, a large proportion of existing capital works will approach the end of their operating lives over the next decade (SCA 1998), and the Government's recent increase in funding for ?ood defense construction and repair has been declared insufficient by the Select Committee on Agriculture (SCA), among others. More importantly, the continued reliance on hard-engineered defenses is fundamentally incompatible with the need to manage ?oodplain in accordance with the natural processes operating (e.g. Williams 1994; Fordham 2000).

These problems are exacerbated when social changes and population projections are considered. Such pressures will increase the demand for new homes (e.g. DOE 1996), and many will have to be constructed on sites liable to ?ooding. This is likely to increase both the incidence of, and vulnerability to, ?ooding in the future, despite the Environment Agency's role as statutory consultee and adviser on all planning applications. In addition, increasing concern about the economic costs of extreme weather events has prompted many insurance companies to introduce premium loading (differential pricing), which could eventually result in 'red-lining' for those located in extremely high risk areas (e.g. ABI 2001; Crichton 2001).

In the context of these pressures, and with the possibility of a greater frequency and severity of ?ood events in the future, it has become increasingly apparent that the institutional and legislative arrangements for managing ?ood risk in the UK require reform. Traditional ?ood management strategies have either overlooked the important social dimensions of public hazard understanding and vulnerability, or incorporated these factors through inappropriate quantitative measures, such as cost-bene?t analysis, when attempting to justify ?ood defense works or improvements in monitoring and prediction.

Instead, there is a need to adopt long-term risk management strategies grounded in an understanding of exposure to the ?ood hazard, characteristics and patterns of vulnerability, and the relationships between different stakeholders in the perception of ?ood risk. These issues are often discussed separately in the literature, with a tendency to conceptualize vulnerability as a function of easily identi?able objective factors, such as proximity to hazard source, or age of ?oodplain ...