Flood resilience strategy: consultation

3. Changing the narrative

Moving from fixing flooding problems to creating flood resilient places

Climate change is happening faster than we thought and we must act now to ensure our communities can continue to thrive in the long term. If we don’t start the process now, future generations will be left with more to do in a shorter space of time and at greater cost. Our current approach to managing flooding is geared towards trying to fix flooding problems to allow us to continue to do the same things in the same places with a reduced exposure to flooding. However, recent events such as the flood in Brechin in October 2023 show the challenge of protecting flood prone areas in our changing climate.

We must now change how we think about flooding and focus on how we can take all the opportunities available to us to create flood resilient places, reducing our flood exposure and taking actions to lessen the impacts when flooding does occur.

What does flood resilience look like?

How a community develops its flood resilience will vary from place to place depending on their flood exposure, local opportunities, and the needs of their community. For example, in some places, actions could include building blue and green infrastructure such as raingardens, or parks that provide space for water to reduce surface water flooding. In another, this could mean small scale local flood protection or property level flood resilience measures to reduce the impacts of flooding from a small river. In another, it could mean a long-term plan to move properties away from the floodplain of a larger river or a vulnerable coastline where protection cannot be provided.

Developing community flood resilience will require relevant authorities, communities and public and private sector stakeholders to work together in new ways to make this happen. Enabling communities to develop their flood resilience will require access to a wide range of actions and support.

Around the world countries are responding to this in different ways. Here are some examples of what they are doing:

• The Netherlands’ Delta Programme, which has overarching responsibility for providing flood risk and freshwater management in the Netherlands and takes a whole-system view, considers how to build climate resilience up to and beyond 2050.
• New Zealand published its first National Adaptation Plan in 2022, which places significant emphasis on the possibility for managed retreat away from exposed areas;
• London is managing its flood exposure for the long term through the Thames Estuary 2100 programme, which will adapt the estuary to changes resulting from climate change and sea level rise.

Our Engagement

Over the past year we have run workshops and online surveys with communities and stakeholders to find out what big changes we need to make to become flood resilient. We have heard from hundreds of people including community representatives, flood management practitioners and policy officials. We gathered lots of useful information and ideas about what we must do.

Scottish Government worked with our partner organisations Sniffer, ClimateXChange and the Scottish Flood Forum to run the workshops. Sniffer analysed the output and we have distilled all this information into three themes for the Strategy:

People: Involving people in decisions about improving flood resilience in their places and highlighting the contributions individuals can make to community flood resilience.

Places: What changes we must make to our places to increase our flood resilience.

Processes: Making changes to the way we do things and the way we work together to enable us to create flood resilient places.

Guiding Principles

Influenced by our engagement so far, we propose that the following key principles should underpin the Flood Resilience Strategy.

These will guide our approach to dealing with flooding and help us to make the most of all the resources available to us.

1. We will change the focus from ‘fixing flooding problems’ to creating flood resilient places.

2. Flood resilience is part of community resilience and part of adapting to climate change, so everyone has a role to play.

3. At the heart of our flood resilience activities will lie the principles of a Just Transition (to secure a fairer, greener future for all by working in partnership to deliver fairness and tackle inequality and injustice).

4. Everyone benefits from flood resilient places, and we all have a contribution to make.

Questions

1. Do you support the change from fixing flooding problems to creating flood resilient places? Yes/No - please give the reason(s) for your answer.

2. How can decision makers ensure that actions taken to improve flood resilience align with the aims of a Just Transition to achieve a fairer, greener future?

3. Who do you think has a role in Scotland to help us become more flood resilient and to help us adapt to the impacts of climate change? (Please rank from most to least important)

a. Individuals

b. Homeowners

c. Businesses

d. Scottish Government

e. Scottish Water

f. Local Authorities

g. Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA)

h. Land owners/land managers

i. Farmers and crofters

j. House builders/developers

k. Community groups

l. Other (please specify)