Climate change and urban flooding: why we fail to manage water in the built environment

Overview

Water is uniquely placed to offer a range of benefits to the built environment but you have to work hard to find some good news stories about water at the moment.

Trust in water companies is at a historic low; urban flooding from fluvial and pluvial sources is increasingly high profile; and discharges from combined sewer overflows are rarely out of the news.

These problems are not unique to the UK, however, our responses to these problems are rooted in our infrastructural traditions and fail to address the scale of the issue.

Sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) are often presented as a ‘silver bullet’ adaptation solution to climate risks – especially urban flooding – and phrases such as ‘integrated water management’ (IWM) are increasingly used when discussing water management solutions.

However, despite the increasing need to counter climate issues including flood risk, the urban heat island effect, water quality standards, and access to green space, the implementation and understanding of SuDS and IWM is patchy and faces many technical and institutional barriers which hinder delivery.

This presentation will give a brief overview of the urban flooding and climate challenges facing the UK, and will explore some of the interventions available to mitigate them. In particular, it will explore some of the barriers faced when trying to deliver these interventions at the project level and aims to provoke reflection on how we as an industry can do better.

The webinar is part of the monthly Lunch & Learn series from ICE South West.