Join us for Confluence 2020, which will be delivered through two webinars and a series of video project updates this year. We invite all partners, academics, stakeholders and those with an interest in catchment management to join us.
The two themed webinars will each cover several iCASP and iCASP-partner projects, including the links between them and impacts achieved to date, as well as providing an opportunity for a Q&A session and discussion of future project ideas, priorities and ways to maximise impact.
The video updates will outline progress on projects not covered in the webinars and will be made available on the iCASP website for anyone to view from 26 June onwards. The webinars will be recorded and made available online afterwards. A summary of the Q&As submitted and discussed during the webinars will also be made available.
Programme
Webinar 1: Increasing the climate resilience of Yorkshire’s cities, towns and villages (Friday 26 June, 14.00-16.00)
14.00 – 14.30 – Welcome to Confluence 2020 and overview of iCASP
14.30 – 16.00 – Themed session on ‘Increasing the climate resilience of Yorkshire’s cities, towns and villages’
Introduction (Ben Rabb)
Session 1: climate service projects and activities (Ben Rabb and tbc)
Session 2: flood forecasting projects and activities (Cathryn Birch and tbc)
Session 3: flood resilience projects and activities (Paola Sakai, Steve Wragg and Jenny Armstrong)
Session 4: green & blue infrastructure and interoperability projects and activities (David Dawson and Andy Brown)
Q&A and discussion
Webinar 2: Where next for Yorkshire’s soils? (Tuesday 30 June 09.30 – 11.30)
09.30 – 11.00 – Themed session on ‘Where next for Yorkshire’s soils’
Introduction (Jonathan Leake)
Session 1: public goods – soil health (Pippa Chapman)
Session 2: payment for outcomes – soil and NFM (Elizabeth Sullivan)
Session 3: CONSOLE – learning from the EU about agri-environmental schemes (Manolis Tyllianakis)
Session 4: integrated nitrogen management – supporting national policy development (Kevin Hicks)
Q&A and discussion
11.00 – 11.30 – Wrap-up and summary of the issues covered in this webinar and the previous one to outline ways forward and future project opportunities
There are seven iCASP workstreams, six of which focus on delivering solutions to problems across the catchment; the seventh overarches the whole programme. The six solution-focused workstreams are carbon sequestration, climate resilience, drought & flood risk mitigation, flood forecasting, sustainable agriculture and water quality.
An iCASP project will typically have elements of several workstreams within it demonstrating the integrated nature of the work we do. When developing a project, proposers are required to think about which of the workstreams the project delivers to.
The six solution-focused workstreams
The seventh workstream, that cuts across everything we do, is social & economic analysis. A range of activities are underway to assess how the programme is making a difference through collating and analysing the impacts of our work and understanding stakeholders and how they benefit. This information is reported to our funder, the Natural Environment Research Council, to demonstrate the work underway, the difference it has made and also increase learning about ways that future funding might best support and achieve solutions to the problems encountered in the world around us.
Each workstream has a workstream lead sitting on our Executive Management Group (EMG) to ensure projects draw upon all the available expertise across the iCASP programme.
Due to the current Covid-19 situation, the Confluence event we had planned for Friday 26 June will no longer be going ahead as a face to face meeting. Instead there will be series of webinars and video updates of projects.
We are currently finalising the details. If you would like to be kept notified, please drop us a line at icasp@leeds.ac.uk
As well as the various natural flood management (NFM) projects we have running within the iCASP programme at the moment, we also provide information and guidance to other organisations with their NFM projects.
A key aspect of this is providing advice about initial and ongoing monitoring of NFM measures. This means it’s possible to understand not only the impact the measures have had, but also to influence and inform the design, planning and installation of future measures, on the same and other sites to maximise their effectiveness. We also gather data and carry out analysis on the measuring and monitoring taking place.
Footage released in March from some sites in the Upper Calder valley showed the quantities of water that NFM measures have had to deal with over the past winter, especially when storms Ciara and Dennis arrived on our shores. The video footage below was captured by University of Leeds researchers as part of work being carried out for the National Trust who have been installing NFM measures across some of their land holdings.
Footage showing how fast water rose during Storms Ciara and Dennis (Daily Motion)
But we don’t just provide scientific advice and guidance on measuring, monitoring and installing NFM; through volunteers from the University of Leeds the measures are also being installed in different locations. One of the great things about NFM measures are that they can be installed by members of the community with appropriate guidance and management. Staff and student volunteers who live, study and work at the University of Leeds are involved with several NFM and tree planting schemes in Yorkshire.
Volunteering doesn’t just benefit the communities downstream of where the NFM measures have been installed, but the health and well-being of the volunteers as well. Over the last six months, volunteers from Australia, China, Malawi, Pakistan, Spain, UK and USA have helped build leaky dams and plant trees. The University set up the volunteering scheme to provide staff and students with an opportunity to get out and about, to meet new people and learn new skills all while doing valuable work in local communities near the university.
University of Leeds tree planting group on 12 March 2020 (volunteers were from Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Kyrgyzstan, Palestine, Philippines, UK and USA) Photo credit: Mike Leonard
University of Leeds student and staff volunteers building leaky dams in November 2019. Photo credit: Mike Leonard
XiaoXiao Ma, a PhD student researching the poet John Clare, has volunteered on workdays organised by Yorkshire Wildlife Trust to install leaky dams and plant trees. While her research would not seem the most obvious fit with building leaky dams, she was keen to get first-hand experience of working on the land and connecting with nature and her research has subsequently benefited through her growing understanding of the things John Clare was writing about. She outlines two benefits she got from being a volunteer:
Building a leaky dam Photo credit: Xiaoxiao Ma
“When I work in the field, when I use tools such as a hammer, a rake, or a spade to interact with the land, I can feel the interconnectedness between humanity and nature. We live on the land. Our life relies on the land. We are interdependent
Being a volunteer enables me to make new friends. I met Lee Galston in my first wild work day event and since then we have been very good friends. On the day when we first me, we found we shared common interests such as literature, walking, and nature. We fit in well with each other.”
Xiaoxiao Ma, University of Leeds
Lee Galston who works in the University’s Accommodation Team has also attended volunteer training days and recalls one led by Don Vine from Yorkshire Wildlife Trust as he outlined the work to be done and ensured this was done safely and effectively:
“Don was incredible at what he did, and a huge part of why I’ve enjoyed coming along to the volunteering days. He was great at teaching us how to do the tasks on the day, but he was also generous with his vast knowledge of nature (trees and water, he told me, were his thing, he wasn’t too bothered about birds). Volunteering with him has genuinely changed the way I look at the natural world.
My favourite conversation we had with Don was actually the day Xiaoxiao and I met. She’s writing her PhD dissertation on the poet John Clare and he got really excited talking about Clare’s poetry, which is very nature centric. He told us that he and some friends would play a game of bingo based on Clare’s Shepherd’s Calendar, which has a poem for each month of the year, where they’d try to take a photo of anything they saw that was mentioned in that month’s poem.”
Lee Galston, University of Leeds
Happy volunteers at the end of a productive day Photo credit: XiaoXiao Ma
Student volunteers at University of Leeds, drawn from 18 different countries around the world, have contributed to installing natural flood management measures on several sites and tree planting projects that have been informed by researchers to ensure they are sited appropriately for the role they are to play. Some of the measures are part of high profile flood risk reduction schemes, such as the Leeds Flood Alleviation Scheme, developed and funded in response to past flood events.
While this news article was being written, we heard the very sad news that Don Vine, who coordinated the activities of many of the volunteers on Yorkshire Wildlife Trust NFM workdays, had suddenly passed away a few weeks previously. He led volunteer workdays that the University was involved with for many years and clearly made an incredible impression on the people he worked with as became clear when I contacted volunteers and volunteer coordinators to write this news piece. The leaky dams he built with volunteers, and the trees planted to help reduce flood risk to communities across the region, remain dotted across the landscape he clearly loved and felt passionate about.
News articles about different NFM projects that iCASP and University of Leeds have contributed to:
We’ve just issued our winter newsletter to give you an update on what we have been up to over the last few months.
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It would be hard to have missed the vast quantities of water across parts of the UK over the past few months, but when water isn’t so obvious other ways are needed to track where water is, how much there is and what it is doing.
Monitoring of water is routine and carried out by the
Environment Agency, water companies and local authorities, amongst others, and
covers rivers, water and groundwater levels, pumping stations, overflows,
sewage treatment works and rainfall levels. Many of these monitoring and
gauging stations feed their results in automatically from remote or
inaccessible locations meaning many measurements can be recorded without human
interaction. In many cases measurements are captured every 15 minutes and fed
back to the system daily; data as far back as 10 years ago is available for
some gauges and monitors. Some of the Environment Agency’s gauges have been
taking measurements for almost 40 years
This vast wealth of data is held and used by different organisations and, until recently, had never been combined to create a better understanding of what is happening in a region. Until that is, the Living with Water (LWW) Telemetry Integration project team collaborated through their partnership work to share various data sets.
Combined data from the Environment Agency, East Riding of Yorkshire Council and Yorkshire Water showing the spatial distribution of gauges and monitoring stations across the region
The LWW partnership are working together with other
organisations in this Catchment Telemetry Integration project to better
understand what data is being routinely captured and where, and will be using
it to identify ways for its use in improved forecasting and responses.
Ultimately the data will be used to influence where future monitoring might be
most usefully installed to provide the most useful data.
The project team produced the first ‘combined data’ maps earlier this year which show the locations and types of all the monitoring stations across Hull and East Riding, including how long they have been operating for.
Combined data from the Environment Agency, East Riding of Yorkshire Council and Yorkshire Water showing the duration of measurements, in months, by individual monitoring stations (the larger the circle the greater the duration of measurements)
These maps are provisional results so far, but show the amount of monitoring already taking place across the region.
By sharing this data, and ultimately combining it with
decision-making tools, the project team hope to develop an early warning tool
that will help improve operational preparedness and improve response times at
the outset of a flood risk event.
A new survey has just been launched by The Yorkshire Property Flood Resilience Pathfinder project to understand levels of Property Flood Resilience (PFR) across Yorkshire. This project is one of three national projects commissioned by DEFRA and is led by the City of York Council partnering with several local stakeholders including Yorkshire Water, Living with Water, the Environment Agency and Yorkshire based local authorities.
The project will work with communities, planning and construction professionals, the insurance sector, and local authorities to deliver sessions to encourage behaviour change regarding the perceptions of flood risk awareness and flood resilience.
River Ouse, York Photo courtesy of Environment Agency
Addressing a diverse audience base, a range of activities will be developed to actively involve and empower local communities and businesses to adopt measures to make themselves and their properties more resilient to flooding. All districts in the Yorkshire region have different experiences with flooding so including local context is a crucial part of the project’s approach.
iCASP has been commissioned to survey current knowledge, attitudes and uptake of PFR measures across the region at the start of the project. The survey will be repeated again at the end of the project to understand the impact the Pathfinder project has had.
The initial survey is appropriate for those who live, work or operate in Yorkshire and have been affected by flooding. All contributions through this survey will help inform the development of educational workshops being undertaken throughout 2020 to help improve awareness of, and overcome potential barriers to, the uptake of Property Flood Resilience.
If you would like more information about the project, you can follow its progress on Twitter or email the project team (YorkshirePropertyFloodResilience@york.gov.uk). More information will be shared once sessions have been organised.
Confluence 2020 will take place on Friday 26 June at Nexus, University of Leeds – so please, save the date!
We want to involve partners and stakeholders in shaping the agenda so are keen to understand your views on what we can most usefully schedule into the agenda and cover throughout the day.
We anticipate following a similar structure to previous years with an overview of the programme and updates from several projects in the morning, as well as a keynote presentation from an MP or equivalent. In the afternoon we anticipate a range of parallel breakout sessions to give attendees an opportunity to go into more detail on issues and engage with fellow attendees. At the end of the day we will wrap it all up in a final summary session
Confluence 2019: breakout session
If you would like to comment on ideas for this year’s Confluence, make suggestions for sessions or topics you would like to be discussed, please complete this short survey or drop us a line at icasp@leeds.ac.uk
iCASP’s Dr Jenny Armstrong and Dr Ben Rabb, working in collaboration with the Priestley International Centre for Climate have contributed to two chapters – one on the climate science focusing on the increased risks of flooding and droughts and the second suggesting ways in which we can work with natural processes to improve the resilience of households.
2019 was a record breaking year for both hot weather and autumn rainfall with the UK experiencing the hottest summer and warmest winter days ever recorded. This came on the back of the prolonged heatwave and joint hottest summer season on record in 2018. While insurance claims arising from too much water resulting in flooding are the stories we usually hear, there was also a surge in insurance subsidence claims as a result of the hot, dry conditions.
Image: Flood Victims June 2007 – Keith Lavarack CC BY-SA2.0 (geograph.org.uk)
1.8 million people in the UK currently live in areas at significant risk from flooding, and this number is growing. If the current rate of warming continues the number of people at risk could rise to 2.6 million in as little as 20 years.
While our homes may be at risk, they are also a contributing factor to rising emissions. Heating and hot water in UK homes currently makes up 25% of total energy usage and 15% of greenhouse gas emissions, and more housing is planned.
The report highlights a range of actions that can be taken; from decarbonising our homes to reduce emissions to improving the resilience of households to the impacts of climate change. Suggested actions don’t just happen in our home, for example peatland preservation can not only sequester carbon helping reduce total emissions, but also reduce surface water runoff and in turn reduce flood risk.
Publication of the report marks the launch of the annual #ShowTheLove campaign from the Climate Coalition. Every February since 2015, people are encouraged to show the love for the things they want to protect from climate change, and showcase the ways they can create a safer world for future generations. Actions include making and sharing green hearts, writing to local MPs and starting conversations about climate change.
The Climate Coalition is the UK’s largest group of people dedicated to action against climate change. Along with their sister organisations Stop Climate Chaos Cymru and Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, they are a group of over 140 organisations — including the National Trust, Women’s Institute, Oxfam, and RSPB — and 22 million voices strong.
The cost of the 2015 Boxing Days floods was £47M in Calderdale alone, and the indirect knock-on effects to the regional economy was £179M. This is just from one flood event. In every flood event there is the immediate damage, loss and destruction which is often highly visible; the knock-on effects which are wide-reaching and significant are not always so obvious. With climate change we are likely to experience more extreme weather events that can lead to flooding, so we need to improve our resilience across society.
The Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector can be highly
vulnerable to flood impacts. Because a large proportion of the private sector
is made up of SMEs – about 99% of Yorkshire’s private sector is made up of SMEs
– flooding can have a massive impact across the wider region reaching areas
outside those that were flooded.
Our newest iCASP project seeks to address this issue through
supporting the SME sector to become more resilient to the impacts of flooding
so the negative impacts on the wider economy are reduced.
Currently there is a large knowledge gap about the impacts of flooding upon SME businesses; this lack of knowledge extends from the SMEs themselves, through insurers and lenders, local and sub-regional authorities to national government. The effect of this knowledge gap can mean SMEs not understanding how to protect themselves adequately, and insurers or lenders not understanding the risks and so not providing lending or insurance. At the government level this lack of knowledge can manifest as a lack of appropriate funding being included in businesses cases and missed opportunities for evidenced resource allocation and investment in preventive measures.
This project will bring together local authorities and the insurance sector to help them improve their understanding of the impacts of flooding upon SMEs, identify how they can support the sector to become better prepared for floods and help prioritise their responses if and when flooding occurs. A key aspect of the project will be a robust methodology that can be used to assess the direct and indirect costs of flooding. This will enable local authorities (LAs) to carry out future flood assessments and subsequently develop evidenced and robust business plans for funding to support better responses for any future flooding.
“The Leeds City Region Flood Review was published in 2016 and developed in partnership between West Yorkshire Combined Authority/LEP, local authorities, Yorkshire Water and the Environment Agency. The Review and its 19 recommendations aim to implement a more consistent and effective approach to both flood risk management and mitigation, and responding to future flood events across the City Region. Recommendation 3 of the Review relates directly to this project as it confirms the urgent need for a robust regional formula for modelling the indirect economic impact of flooding”.
Regional Authority
The ability of lenders and insurers to accurately assess and understand the likely risks of flooding will enable them to understand the right level of risk, develop new products and properly price the current products unlocking access to them for SMEs who may currently be unable to do so. An improved understanding of the effectiveness of different protection and resilience measures could also boost an increase in lending for preventive purposes and thus better uptake of these important measures to improve resilience.
“The work package on insurance will cover an important gap as it provides valuable information to insurers/lenders and surveyors to increase our understanding of SME flood risk. When I hold my regular meetings with insurers, they are bought into the concept of resilience, but cannot move forward meaningfully to acknowledge it without more information and evidence. They want to understand from SMEs what is the real financial impact of a flood. But also, what difference in financial terms has, or could, a resilient strategy make to the cost of the claim. The tool that the project will co-create to assess the effectiveness of resilience measures will be key to identifying the most beneficial strategies SMEs can take to protect themselves”.
Insurance broker specialising in flood risk
As with all iCASP projects this has been co-designed and will be carried out in close collaboration with partners and stakeholders. Co-creation ensures efforts are joined-up to support widespread uptake in the Yorkshire region, and nationally, to spread the benefits of closing this current gap in our knowledge. This exciting new project will push the limits of our understanding on the economic impacts of flooding on SMEs and the effectiveness of property flood resilience measures. And, in collaboration with the City of York Pathfinder project “Yorkshire Future Flood Resilience”, it will work to improve the uptake of Property Flood Resilience across Yorkshire and the UK.
