Flood risk and climate change for London partnerships
The London case study built a disaster risk profile for the city and judged its flood partnerships on resilience, efficiency, equity and the incentives they give to reduce risk.
- Region: London, United Kingdom
- Hazard: flooding from storm surge, rivers, heavy rainfall and surface water
- Period: present and future, under climate change and urban growth
- Partners as printed: GLA, DCLG, Defra, EA, HMT, the London Boroughs, the ABI and its members, reinsurers (such as Munich Re), brokers (such as Willis), and LSE, with Swenja Surminski as contact
The case study was first titled “Flood risk and climate change implications for MSPs” and later “UK Flood risk and insurance implications for MSPs”. Its premise was that London’s flood risk will grow. Four drivers were named: urban growth, more household contents to damage, climate change and ageing flood defences.
The team reviewed existing risk analyses and the history of flood impacts to build a disaster risk profile for London. It then evaluated the city’s current risk partnerships, and possible new ones, against four criteria: resilience, efficiency, equity and incentives for risk reduction.
The instruments considered:
- flood defences;
- property-level protection;
- spatial planning and zoning;
- insurance and innovative finance.
The work drew on earlier projects, Floodsite and ARCADIA, and on the surface-water flood maps of the Greater London Authority’s Drain London programme. Surminski described the case, and its joint modelling with the University of Oxford, in an interview in 2014.
The insurance strand of the study followed the debate that produced Flood Re. Practical guidance on checking flood risk in England is collected under flood risk in the UK, and the other ENHANCE cases are in the case-study atlas.