Bright Blue’s report, In Deep Water? has featured in an article by BusinessGreen.
The article discusses how flooding has inflicted major damage and disruption to businesses, communities, infrastructure, hospitals, and schools across the UK over the past 14 years. The article highlights the analysis used in the report utilises a novel artificial intelligence (AI) technique to scan thousands of local, regional, and national newspaper articles for reports on flood events and their impacts to create an interactive map of the UK's flooding woes since 2007.
The report author Helen Jackson, Associate Fellow at Bright Blue was quoted in the article:
The vast disruption caused by storms and flooding across the UK was likely to escalate in the coming years due to climate change, highlighting the need "to be more preventative and less reactive" to extreme weather incidents.
"We need to recognise this trend and do much more to ensure our urban drainage and sewer systems can cope with heavy rainfall as the climate changes.
"This should include limiting the spread of impermeable surfaces in our cities and ensuring basic measures like drain cleaning are not overlooked.
"The recent furore over sewage spills highlighted the importance of adequate drainage and sewerage systems for environmental quality - but this is not just an environmental issue, it is a public safety issue."
Ryan Shorthouse, Bright Blue's Chief Executive, said:
The Covid-19 crisis exposed that "the UK sometimes lacks preparedness for unforeseen disasters".
"Flooding is one of the most serious climate-related challenges that this country is facing and will continue to face as the climate changes further in the coming years," he said. "Reaching net zero emissions is vitally important, but the impact of flooding is already being felt deeply in communities across the UK. The UK government can and must do much more to better improve the resilience of local communities, businesses, public services, and critical infrastructure to flooding."
You can read the full article here and the full report here.
