How do we become more resilient to natural hazards?
The recent severe storms and high tides that have affected many communities in the South West
have drawn attention to the ways in which we plan for and respond to natural hazards. For many
people living in the UK, there is sometimes a tendency to think that natural disasters are events that
occur overseas and that we are immune to the forces of nature. Yet those communities living along
Devon and Cornwall’s coast and in low lying areas of the peninsula recognise that our geographical
location mans that the combined forces of land, sea and weather can have damaging and long
lasting consequences. This winter’s flooding has largely been the result of successive storms
sweeping in from the Atlantic, driven by a Jet Stream in the upper atmosphere that is channelling
weather depressions quickly across the ocean towards us. In fact, we’ve now been in this situation
since December the 9th according to the Met Office, with little prospect of a change in conditions
before March.
The consequences are serious and we don’t need to record these in detail for readers – many of
them will have been directly affected. We have all seen the physical impacts on our landscape –
coastal defences breached, infrastructure destroyed and disrupted and vast areas of land flooded.
We have also seen the immediate human cost: people’s homes damaged and flooded, farmland
rendered unusable, businesses closed and losing money. And these are just the immediate
consequences. Research into the impacts of natural hazards over recent years has shown that the
psychological effects of flooding are significant and long lasting, with people finding it difficult to
cope with the social upheaval wrought by such disasters and the stress that living with hazards in the
future can bring. In sum, the impacts are substantial, long lasting and have profound effects on the
people involved.
As we have come to learn in the media, there is considerable debate over the most effective ways of
preparing for and coping with such disasters. One way of dealing with flooding is to try and ‘engineer
out’ the risk – to build larger, higher and stronger defences and to carry on normal life behind them.
Traditionally, this approach was preferred because of the obvious benefits this offered communities
and businesses through protection. Indeed, in some areas, building defences and properly
maintaining them will afford regular and long-term flood protection.
However, the approach of ‘engineering out’ risk has its limitations. First, research has demonstrated
that when communities and businesses only rely on physical defences, they can become more
vulnerable to flood risk because they are not psychologically prepared to deal with a flood that
overtops the walls, meaning that there is a much greater level of economic losses and psychological
trauma. Second, there are often trade-offs that people in communities need to make between the
demand for flood protection on the one hand and the arguments for preserving the natural
landscape. For example, there are often arguments about how large coastal defences should be,
given that coastal resorts often rely on the aesthetics of the coastline to attract tourists and the
income they bring. Third, and perhaps the most significant for the long term, physical flood defences
can only ever react to events that we’re able to predict with some accuracy and by their nature, are
not flexible and able to adapt to changing conditions. Because of the threats posed by humaninduced climate change, it is likely that we will see more winter storms like those we’re currently
experiencing and an overall rise in sea levels. Although it’s not possible to attribute any one storm
event to climate change, recent reports from the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change
indicate that that the UK will experience more frequent severe storms.
As a response to these three concerns, many communities, planners, scientists and researchers have
begun to look at different ways of managing the risks associated with flooding and coastal erosion
that try to balance the competing interests involved. In doing so, they have focused on two key ideas
that may hold the key to providing hope for our communities in the future. First is the idea of
‘adaptation’. We’re all familiar with the ways in which our natural landscape has evolved over time
to adapt to the prevailing weather conditions in the South West and in the same way, there are ways
in which communities, businesses, land owners and individuals can adapt the ways they live to cope
with an issue like flooding. Some obvious ones include simple but effective adaptations in people’s
homes, like installing electrical sockets higher on the walls, having solid floors to make clean-ups
easier and having a plan when a flood warning is issued. In other cases, there are more difficult
discussions that might be needed about whether some communities adapt by re-locating certain
services and properties to reduce their risk.
But adaptation is only part of the story. Adaptation doesn’t necessarily deal with the deeper impacts
of natural disasters like flooding – the economic, social and psychological costs. And that’s why many
communities are now advocating ‘resilience’ as something that they believe they need to acquire.
Once again, resilience is a term used to describe how different natural habitats bounce back from
shocks (anything from a storm to an earthquake) but it is being applied more and more to humans as
a way of illustrating how our communities can bounce back from disasters and become stronger as a
result. So community resilience in the face of flooding or coastal erosion is about more than flood
gates or changes to buildings, it’s about how people prepare for disasters, what they do when they
strike and how they pull together to re-build their community afterwards.
A critical component of community resilience to cope with issues like flooding is about the approach
people take to understanding the threat they face and the changes they can make to cope. In the
past, ‘solutions’ to problems like flooding were suggested and implemented by a largely expert-led
group of scientists, engineers and planners. With the advent of community resilience, the approach
to managing disasters has been to look at the whole community and draw on the expertise offered
from land owners, businesses and residents alongside those with technical training. Such an
approach is vital because it incorporates local knowledge into the process of decision making and
gives everyone involved more confidence in the outcomes. In other words, it’s about involving
everyone in the process of understanding the threat and enabling people to collectively plan for
future disasters. And what this means is that communities can appreciate and draw upon their most
valuable resource – community spirit and using existing social networks to bounce back from a flood
event.
By focusing on resilience and involving more people in the process of understanding and planning for
disasters, we can tackle some of the longer term impacts of natural hazards, in particular long lasting
economic and psychological problems in communities. Sometimes the way forward is obvious, but
on other occasions becoming more resilient will mean making bigger changes to our communities –
changes that may mean some hard negotiations now, but could well result in stronger and more
sustainable places to live in the future.
Stewart Barr and Ewan Woodley
Department of Geography
University of Exeter