National Flood Resilience Strategy

Outcome One: People

Creating flood resilient places involves our people and communities.

This outcome focuses on how our people and communities can contribute to our flood resilience.

It is our people and communities who suffer most when flooding happens, and for those directly affected, the impacts are often devastating and long-lasting. As well as the immediate impacts to flooded homes and businesses, it can disrupt our lives, livelihoods and impact on our physical and mental health long after the flood event itself. Floods often have impacts on community cohesion too and can have a negative effect on community identity. Communities that have been flooded often refer to a long-lasting heightened state of alert and anxiety when heavy rain is happening or is forecast. In recent years we have heard from some communities that they do not feel involved enough in the design of flood resilience options for their places.

What’s already happening

• Scottish Government promotes community-led action and works to embed community resilience through a number of connected policy areas which enables collaboration between community resilience groups, voluntary sector organisations, Government and statutory responders. Scottish Government has committed up to £5.5 million, in 2024-25, to fund a network of Climate Action Hubs to transition to low carbon, reduce emissions, and improve resilience in the face of ongoing climate change and extreme weather events. The Ready Scotland website (ready.scot)^[12] and associated digital campaigns also provide a range of advice to individuals and communities to help them to prepare for and respond to weather-related disruption.
• Scottish Government supports Scottish Flood Forum to work with communities and local authorities across Scotland to reduce the impacts of flooding on individuals and communities. They do this by providing immediate support to flooded communities and by establishing a network of community resilience groups in flood risk areas to equip communities to cope with the impacts and threat of flooding.
• Scottish Government supports the Scottish Flood Forecasting Service, a partnership between the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) and the Met Office. The service produces daily forecasts predicting the likelihood and timing of river, coastal and surface water flooding across Scotland up to five days ahead giving organisations, communities and individuals advance warning and time to prepare.
• SEPA’s Floodline service provides live flooding information and advice on how to prepare for or cope with the impacts of flooding 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This includes a flood warning service allowing people time to prepare to take action to reduce the impact of flooding on their homes, businesses and communities.

Informed communities know their places best, so we need to put people at the heart of building their community flood resilience. Around Scotland there are already many initiatives where people are getting involved in contributing to their own or their community’s flood resilience and some examples are set out below.

Case Study: Tillicoultry Flood Group and partnership working

In January 2008, following days of heavy rain, the River Devon burst its banks and quickly flooded 17 homes and a commercial property in Tillicoultry, Clackmannanshire. The impact on residents was devastating, losing their homes and community in a matter of minutes and being relocated to temporary accommodation for up to 9 months until their homes were dried out and reinstated.

In response, Tillicoultry residents formed a Flood Group and worked closely with Clackmannanshire Council and the Scottish Flood Forum to identify flood risks and to identify simple actions to improve their flood resilience. The developed partnership, working with key frontline agencies, secured public funding for demountable flood defences. A significant amount of work has taken place on agreeing how, when and where partners work together and focus efforts where they were most needed. Response planning was based on experience and trial and error, where the approach was refined after actual storm events.

Within a year, a walkway that separates homes from the river was raised by almost two metres and three years later, a pumping station was installed to help manage surface water.

In 2017 the Tillicoultry Flood Group became part of a network of flood groups along the Hillfoots area of Clackmannanshire, supported by the Council. The group worked in partnership with Scottish Fire and Rescue, Police Scotland, the Scottish Flood Forum, and others to produce a Flood Plan for the area that sets out how volunteers would work alongside other agencies to respond to flooding events. This plan was shared with the other Hillfoots groups to provide the basis of their response planning and adapted to suit local conditions. The group meets with frontline partners after each flood event to debrief and identify potential improvements which could be employed during any future events. Furthermore, flood groups across the Hillfoots area (Menstrie, Alva, Tillicoultry, Dollar and Muckhart) meet monthly to discuss good practice, share experiences, and support one another.

Case Study: Queensland Court and Gardens - delivering multiple benefits for co mmunities

An area of underused greenspace in Cardonald, Glasgow has been transformed into a vibrant community park. The project has delivered an accessible, open space for residents - enhanced through an award-winning landscape design complemented by sustainable drainage measures that reduce flood risk. The project was a partnership between Southside Housing Association and Glasgow City Council.

The attractive new space also boasts dedicated toddler and children's play spaces with climbing frames and slides, as well as a bicycle pump track and cycle storage facilities to encourage active travel. Sustainable drainage measures that mimic nature by slowing down water such as raingardens, basins, and swales, have also been introduced on site to reduce flood risk and increase downstream drainage capacity to support regeneration.

Extensive community engagement has meant that an enhanced open space has been created, which is suited to the community’s needs. Access to good quality green space was identified as being of vital importance by those living in the high-rise accommodation. A survey of residents, carried out by Research Resource on behalf of Southside Housing Association, found that 90% of those surveyed now say their neighbourhood is either a ‘very good’ or ‘good place to live’ - up from 68% before the park was constructed. The project has also delivered health benefits. Compared to a baseline survey from 2020, respondents use of greenspace at Queensland Court and Gardens has increased from 35% to 64% - with 30% now saying they go outdoors in their local area for fresh air 4-7 times a week, compared with only 10% previously.

Case Study: Monitoring Moray’s Coastline and community volunteer research

Public participation in scientific research is being promoted through the creation a network of photographic monitoring points along the Moray coastline. These points will allow the community to upload photographs of coastal change from the same viewpoint and upload them to the CoastSnap App. This information will be used to inform Moray Council's Coastal Adaptation Plans and monitor change.

Communities are being encouraged to engage in the Monitoring Moray’s Coastline project and improve their own knowledge and understanding of how storm events are impacting on the coastline. It is anticipated the project will help raise awareness through public participation in data collection and monitoring.

The project will allow active monitoring of the indicative rate of change of the coastline, based on recording information from the same point. Using photographs will assist in predicting of the rate of change at a given point along the coastline.

The People Actions in this strategy will build on this. Our aim is to work with partners to explore how people and communities can be sufficiently informed and supported to be involved in flood resilience decision making and so contribute to their own flood resilience.

We will do this by:

• Involving and supporting communities:
  • Looking at ways to involve people from the very start of the flood resilience process.
  • Creating a framework for supporting communities in their flood resilience journey.
  • Encouraging and supporting actions by individuals to improve their own flood resilience and that of their community. For example supporting communities and individual householders where appropriate to take small actions to lessen the impacts of floods such as starting up a community flood resilience group or installing property level flood resilience measures.
  • Providing communities with a better understanding of their current and future exposure to flooding and coastal erosion, what this means for those directly impacted, and for the wider community, and the options they may have for improving their resilience through time.
  • Improving community involvement and input to decisions relating to their flood resilience. In particular improving involvement at the options and design stage of flood protection schemes, but also having input to decisions like where new homes could be built so they were not exposed to flooding, or how surface water may be managed through blue and green infrastructure in their community.
  • Exploring how existing mechanisms can be used to support this, such as existing community engagement and consultation processes of the planning system, Local Place Plans, and tools and resources such as the Place Standard with a Climate Lens and the National Standards for Community Engagement.
  • Providing information on current and future flood exposure that can help people make choices when buying or renting their home.
  • Drawing together existing resources to support community flood resilience journeys. This could include combining the resources already provided by Scottish Government’s Resilient Communities Team with SEPA data, Scottish Flood Forum resources, local information and experiences of communities that have successfully set up flood resilience groups.