World experts gather in Leeds to tackle flooding issues

You don’t have to thumb through a newspaper, or watch the TV news, for long to come across stories about our changing climate and the devastating impact it is having.

The monsoon rains that cut a swathe across parts of India, Nepal and Bangladesh last month were described by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) as one of the worst regional humanitarian crises in years.

More than 1,200 people were killed by the devastating floods and tens of thousands were left homeless, while millions were left marooned.

In Mumbai, India’s burgeoning financial capital, the city ground to a halt as trains and flights were cancelled. There were reports of roads waist-deep with water, schools being forced to close and a hospital flooded, forcing staff to evacuate a paediatric ward.

Meanwhile in the US, Hurricane Harvey brought destruction to Texas, and Houston in particular, with at least 47 deaths and more than 43,000 people forced from their homes.

It’s against this turbulent climatic backdrop that Leeds is hosting the three-day International Conference on Flood Management, which gets underway today.

This conference, held every three years, is a major coup for Leeds and brings together many of the world’s leading flood management experts, scientists and city planners.

Professor Joseph Holden, Director of the research centre water@leeds which is organising the conference, says experts have come from as far afield as China and the United States.

“It’s exciting that it’s here in Leeds because it allows us to tap into this international expertise and use it to the best effect in Yorkshire.”

Delegates will be discussing everything from innovative flood management techniques and the importance of urban design, to the ongoing impact of climate change and how best to tackle it.

Prof Holden, from the University of Leeds, says the stakes couldn’t be higher. “Flood management as we’ve seen recently is absolutely vital, it’s a matter of life and death. Climate change will potentially make things worse but there are still things we can do on the ground to reduce loss of life and reduce the financial cost of flooding.

“We might not necessarily stop all these massive floods from happening, but we can do a lot to stop the smaller floods from happening.”

He says local flood strategies have an important role to play. “People need to understand what to do when there’s a flood warning, so communication is crucial.”

Yorkshire is no stranger to flooding. Hebden Bridge was hit twice in just a matter of weeks during the torrential summer downpours of 2012, while the Boxing Day floods of two years ago brought parts of West and North Yorkshire to a standstill with many homes and businesses, not to mention large chunks of the transport network, submerged.

Prof Holden believes lessons are being learned in how we tackle such extreme weather events. “It’s interesting that in our region the Leeds flood alleviation scheme, as well as those in Sheffield and York and smaller schemes like the one in Hebden Bridge, are now looking further up the catchment area.

“They’re not just putting in bigger and better flood defences around towns and cities, they’re all looking at what they can do to the landscape upstream to slow the flow and catch water so that when the peaks go through our towns and cities they’re much smaller,” he says.

“As soon as you start to build bigger flood defences in a city you actually make the water move faster and that affects the next town, so we need to contain the problem further away.”

It’s one of the issues being discussed at this week’s conference. So, too, is the way our towns and cities are designed. For instance there has long been concern at the way urban areas have been turned into glorified concrete jungles.

“If you look across Yorkshire, what’s happened in the last three decades is people have been paving over their gardens so they can put their cars in their driveway,” says Prof Holden.

He says there needs to be greater consideration given to where we build new homes if we’re to help minimise the number of people affected by flooding in the future.

“We’ve built a lot on flood plains and that’s something we’ll have to look at, because if we are going to build in flood-prone areas we need to make sure our building designs are resilient enough, so that they don’t have car parks on ground level, for instance.”

However, he says there is already a growing understanding of the need for closer partnerships when it comes to tackling flooding, involving everyone from Yorkshire Water to the Met Office.

He points to projects like the Yorkshire integrated catchment solutions programme – funded with £5m from the Natural Environment Research Council – which is looking at how existing research on flood prevention can be better harnessed.

“It’s not just about planning for flooding in isolation, we also need to think about things like water quality and farming production and join these things up, because the more integrated our solutions are the more resilient they will be.”

Given the number of times Yorkshire has been hit by floods since the turn of the century it’s only a matter of time before it happens again. “We saw from Boxing Day floods in 2015 the size of the threat we’re facing. The damage to businesses and homes was there for everyone to see.”

The big question is will we be able to cope? Prof Holden says while there is more work to be done, effective flood management can make a difference.

“When we look at the science of all this there are things we can do. We can slow the movement of water across the landscape and we can, even when there’s an awful lot of rain, get that flood peak down.”

Yorkshire, because of its unique geography, is particularly at risk from flooding. “The reason it’s a bigger threat here is we have these upland headwaters in the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors and, because of the steep hills, that water quickly comes into these urban areas, so it’s quite a challenge.”

Nevertheless, it’s one that can be met. “Yes, more money is needed, but the point of the work we are doing and of hosting this conference is to look at how we use that investment to best effect,” he says.

“We can’t stop extreme events from happening and we won’t stop all floods from happening, but when they do occur we can ensure we’re more resilient, that there isn’t loss of life and that we don’t have huge economic losses.

“We can even stop some of the flood events from happening if we actually manage our landscape better.”

A meeting of minds in Leeds

The International Conference on Flood Management is held every three years and this is the first time it has been hosted in the UK.

It’s a forum for discussing the world’s responses to flood risk and brings together engineers, planners, scientists, health specialists, disaster managers and policy-makers to exchange ideas.

Keynote speakers come from organisations such as the Environment Agency, Unesco, as well as universities from around the world.

The conference has been organised in Leeds by water@leeds, one of the world’s largest inter-disciplinary university water research organisations. The previous event in São Paulo attracted delegates from 31 countries.