Climate change adaptation is particularly important in managing the floods of the future – but how much change in the flood related variables do we allow for?
Do we adopt a precautionary approach – planning for the worst - or do we adopt a probabilistic approach, utilising the information on uncertainty that UKCP09 is providing us with? And what are the impacts of these and other approaches for policy makers?
In this study Defra commissioned Halcrow to investigate how UKCP09 might be applied in flood and coastal erosion risk management (FCERM) policy. The research examined alternative approaches to account for climate change in FCERM, following the publication of the UK Climate Projections: 2009 (UKCP09).
In this study we considered several alternative methods for using the probabilistic climate change projections in FCERM. These methods encompass different levels of complexity suited to the types of decisions that may need to be taken for different flood environments, different levels of flood vulnerability, different abilities to adapt and different planning horizons (timescales).