The Government has just announced its ‘Infrastructure Strategy’ for the next decade.

We learn, in looking at it, that the 10 year capital allocation for flooding is just £7.9bn: this falls far short of what’s needed.  The National Infrastructure Commission itself recommended an annual spend of £1.5bn a year as an absolute minimum.   The Government reportedly plans to spend a minimum of £750bn on infrastructure over the next 10 years – investing such a tiny proportion of that on the very measures that will protect that infrastructure from future extreme wet-weather events is reckless and short-sighted.  With 1 in 4 properties already predicted to be at risk of flooding by mid-century, ministers need to do far more to embed climate resilience across all government departments and in all its investment decisions.  

As the recent report from the Climate Change Committee made clear, progress on adaptation is “either too slow, has stalled, or is heading in the wrong direction.”  Furthermore, and this is the crucial point that we want to add to yesterday’s news, instead of an overwhelming focus on short term fixes like flood barriers, we urgently need a comprehensive Climate Adaptation & Resilience Plan which includes investment in flood defences, ecosystem restoration, including wetlands and peatlands, and the creation of ’sponge’ cities designed to absorb heavy rainfall and prevent flash flooding. A Plan that will look ‘upstream’, be holistic, actually be strategic.

This should be the moment to recognise that strategic climate adaptation can not only strengthen economies against threats to which they are increasingly exposed, but also transform communities, strengthening them against natural disasters but also binding them together in new ways.

Will the Government’s new spending and planning priorities, as seen in the Infrastructure Strategy coupled with the recent spending review, actually help make British citizens and communities more resilient in the difficult times we are moving into?

To let you into what is hardly a secret, now: our analysis, after today’s announcement, is that they most definitely won’t. That the new Infrastructure Strategy / plan, combined with the planning bill, will on balance undermine climate and nature in the U.K., and in particular will not help communities prepare strategically for what they are increasingly facing: e.g escalating wildfires and heatwaves as well as floods, chronic uncertainty, possible water and food shortages within years, etc.

Summing up, therefore:

The big worry about the investment in flooding that the Government is promising simply is that it is not strategic.  One special worry about the consequences of this is that such policies continue to hand a gift to Reform: because until we actually help communities prepare for what is here and what is coming in ways that are robust and actually effective over time, we will foment further discontent with politics and government.

It is gradually being realised that building ever more hard flood defences (which is mostly what the Spending Review did, and what the Infrastructure Strategy continues) is an expensive, fragile and potentially dangerous way to go: if you build flood walls or ‘levees’, and these then give out, as has sometimes happened, then you create a worse disaster even than if you hadn’t intervened in the first place. 

There really is a way in which this dilemma can be overcome: by adapting more strategically to the climate-driven rising waters. If cities become like sponges, able to absorb water in porous surfaces to prevent flash flooding; if agricultural practices change so that water doesn’t fly off fields to create raging rivers; if upland land management practices get changed so that our hills and moors absorb water rather than repelling it;  if wetlands and peatlands get restored to absorb much more water (and carbon too)… then we have solutions that are strong, flexible…and, over time, much less expensive. We then have a win-win-win, which will please even the Treasury.  

Might this be the true way to protect ourselves against the rising flood risk? Good for nature, for flood-prone people, and for all taxpayers too.

The authors will be launching the Climate Majority Project’s report on Strategic Adaptation in London on July 9.

Teaser image credit: Partially collapsed Tadcaster Bridge (30 December 2015). By Mtaylor848 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45983907