Planning for the risk of widespread flooding

Research addressing the need for realistic planning scenarios that account for the risk of widespread flooding across England and Wales

• From: Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Research and Development Programme and Environment Agency
• Published: 24 February 2021
• Last updated: 22 March 2024 — See all updates

• Category: Managing flood incidents
• Topics: Big data, Communicating risk, Decision making with uncertainty, Flood costs and Flood forecasting
  Show 5 more
  Flood risk assessment, Incident management, Monitoring and detection, Resilience planning, and Strategy and planning
• Project status: Completed
• Project code: SC140002
• Date of completion: 20 September 2017

Documents

Planning for the risk of widespread flooding - summary (179KB) PDF

Planning for the risk of widespread flooding - technical report (3.2MB) PDF

Planning for the risk of widespread flooding - user guide (6.6MB) PDF

Multivariate Event Modeller (MEM) tool

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Details

This project has developed methods and guidance to address the need for realistic planning scenarios that account for the risk of widespread flooding across England and Wales, flooding from multiple sources (river, surface water and sea) and the potential impacts.

The outputs of the project have:

• highlighted the scale of the risk of flooding to England and Wales
• changed the representation of flood risks for the public facing National Risk Register (NRR) and the Cabinet Office’s National Risk Assessment (NRA)
• helped inform the National Flood Resilience Review (NFRR) and are being taken forward via that route. They will allow central government, emergency planners and responders to review their planning assumptions, emergency response and mutual aid capabilities, to increase the England and Wales preparedness for widespread flooding.

The Multivariate Event Modeller (MEM) tool was updated and openly published in 2024. To contribute to developing the code, please use the GitHub repository

Published 24 February 2021
Last updated 22 March 2024 + show all updates

1. 4 March 2024

   Multivariate Event Modeller software now available to download.

2. 24 February 2021

   First published.