National Flood Resilience Strategy

Ministerial Foreword

Our climate is changing and the impacts around the world and here at home are clear to see.

The 12 named storms last winter showed the significant impacts and costly damage that flooding and coastal storm surges can have on our communities and infrastructure. Storm Babet brought record rainfall and floods to eastern Scotland with devastating impacts for some communities. It highlighted our vulnerability to extreme events, even where we have some flood protection in place.

Many of our European neighbours have also been impacted by severe flooding this year, most recently the catastrophic flooding in Spain which resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives and untold damage to communities.

We know that for us in Scotland flooding will become more frequent and more severe in the decades ahead. As our biggest climate adaptation challenge, we need to do all we can to be prepared for this.

Sea levels, peak rainfall and peak river flows are all set to increase significantly in the years to come resulting in greater flood exposure and more flood impacts. By 2080 nearly 400,000 properties in Scotland will be at risk of flooding compared to the 284,000 we have now.

This Strategy, part of our Scottish National Adaptation Plan 2024-2029 (SNAP3), will help us meet this challenge and facilitate the changes we need to make over the long-term to make our communities more flood resilient.

The Strategy recognises that it is people who are impacted most by flooding and that they must have a bigger role in determining their flood resilient future. Our public and stakeholder engagement over the last eighteen months steered the development of the Strategy including helping us shape the outcomes, guiding principles and priority areas for action.

Building on the success of our Flood Risk Management Plans, the Strategy will look at the flood resilience challenges we face in the much longer term recognising that some of the changes that we need to make will take decades to implement.

Over that period the Strategy will enable the change from trying to stop flooding impacting on our activities to creating flood resilient places where our activities are adapted to the flood risk that we face.

Reducing the impacts of flooding is as much about the design of our places as it is about the design of our flood actions.

To be flood resilient we must adapt our places to our future climate. This means that many of our towns and cities and rural landscapes will look quite different in future. We will see more space being made for water along our rivers and at the coast, fewer properties on the flooding front-line and more blue and green infrastructure and natural flood management actions being used to manage water in urban and rural settings.

We are already seeing these changes happening in our countryside and in some of our towns and cities as spaces are managed differently or redeveloped to provide multiple community benefits including actions that improve our flood resilience.

By acting now and pursuing the flood resilient places approach we will be able to work with multiple sectors to deliver a much broader range of flood resilience measures, all of which will contribute in their own way to creating flood resilient places that are adaptable to our future climate.

Gillian Martin MSP

Acting Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero and Energy