4 adaptation lessons from disastrous events

Following the devastation of Storm Babet, funding announcements were some relief for those whose homes and businesses had been inundated.

Households that had experienced flooding could apply for an immediate benefit of £500. Those with flooded homes and businesses were also potentially eligible for a 100% rebate on council tax and business rates for three months.

SMEs could apply for £2,500 business recovery grants. Owners of flood-affected properties were potentially eligible for £5,000 grants to make their homes or businesses more flood resilient, via the Property Flood Resilience Repair Grant Scheme.

The UK had already learnt from experience ahead of Babet – around 62,000 properties were protected by flood defences, then Environment Secretary Thérèse Coffey said. Those flood defences also meant 374,000 homes were better protected than they were in 2015.

However, no system is perfect, as the experience of the Australian state government body Resilience NSW, set up after the Black Summer bushfires of 2019/20, reveals. Less than two years after it had been set up as a saviour and salve to the state, an inquiry reported that it was ineffective – smaller recovery units, less hampered by red tape, were required. The agency was downsized and shifted unceremoniously aside, and the lauded bushfire hero at the helm stepped down.

Catastrophic floods across Belgium and Germany in 2022 also sparked debate. In Germany discussion focused on dam management and the need for effective early-warning systems to guard against loss of life.

And while weather events are becoming more regular and more intense, the problem of shortcomings in disaster response is not new. The US has faced comparable challenges multiple times including and since 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

Craig Fugate, Administrator of US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) from 2009–17, tweeted in 2018: “Resilience will not come from doing what we have always done. Time to act was yesterday. Today we must adapt.”

Adaptation is a global concern – and the UK Department for Transport quoted Fuagte’s tweet in a recent whitepaper about emergency preparedness. So, where can the UK look for lessons around adaptation?

Insurance ensures nobody is left behind

Perhaps the ultimate example of disaster recovery funding preparedness comes from New Zealand.

Dr Rebecca Bednarek, Associate Professor of Strategic Management at Victoria University of Wellington and co-author of Disaster Insurance Reimagined: Protection in a Time of Increasing Risk, has long been ahead of the game partly because of the nation’s need to insure against its underlying exposure to disaster risk. Those disasters include earthquakes, volcanoes, storms and floods.

“We are one of the most insured countries in the world, despite being one of the most exposed to natural disaster risk,” Bednarek says.

In New Zealand, she explains, Toka Tū Ake, Earthquake Commission (EQC) provides cover for natural disasters via a compulsory levy that is added to all home insurance policies.

“This makes it a lot more affordable for everyone,” Bednarek says. “You’re smoothing out some of the risk reflexive pricing that might otherwise price some people out of the market.”

This pot of insurance money covers homeowners across a number of natural disasters, including earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

“Behind EQC there is also a guarantee, whereby the government would step in and pay if EQC was somehow not able to cover the costs," she says. Bednarek points out that so far EQC has been able to cover losses through accumulation of its Natural Disaster Fund and the reinsurance it buys, including after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake – one of the most costly disasters for the country's insurance industry.

Could this work in the UK?

“The difficulty with these kinds of longstanding, comprehensive solutions [EQC has been in place since 1945] in New Zealand and some other places such as Switzerland, France and Spain, is that it made the most of a particular moment in time,” Bednarek says.

“It might be difficult now for governments, particularly in more individualistic societies such as Australia, the UK and the USA, to set up such a comprehensive solution in exactly the same way. However, the lesson is that we absolutely need to shift away from antagonistic types of relationship between the private insurance market and public intervention in those markets. There are many ways to collaborate and it is only via collaboration that disaster insurance protection will remain possible.”

More realistic for the UK, she says, is a focus on specific insurance gaps. This is demonstrated in the UK by the Flood Re model, a joint initiative between insurers and Government. One weakness: Flood Re has an end date.

“In a world of escalating risk, we can’t continue to think about these more collaborative public/private partnerships and pooling solutions as temporary,” she says. “Furthermore, these mechanisms cannot just be Band-Aids. Insurance must be tied to long-term resilience. We see that in the efforts Flood Re is making to address flood risk not just insure it. And there are lessons to be learnt in the comprehensive research and education efforts led by EQC that has made New Zealand a world-leader in certain ways it manages and understands earthquake risk."

Know the lay of the land

“The recognition of the value of accurate mapping is at an all-time high,” says Rob Andrews at Ordnance Survey, the national mapping service for Great Britain.

“Today, Ordnance Survey mapping and data has never been more accessible and easier to work with.”

Ordnance Survey has a long history. It was established in 1791 to help map the south coast, amid planning to prevent French invasion. Since then, part of its job has been supporting the emergency services in their responses to weather events.

“Accurate geospatial data is critical in responding and helping to respond and recover from extreme weather events,” Andrews says. “It has become a key tool in underpinning decision making and helping to visualise the impact of events, as well as vital in helping support recovery plans and future prevention projects.”

During and following flood events, for example, accurate data helps emergency services to visualise the extent of the situation, including the locations of at-risk infrastructures such as electricity substations, or helping to quickly locate vulnerable members of the community and viable evacuation routes.

The data also, of course, helps funding bodies identify the highest-need areas before, during and after weather events.

“Many organisations now understand the importance of geospatial data and how vital it is to decision making,” Andrews says. “With the new OS National Geospatial Database, users can select and build their own maps and queries.

“For example, we have seen one Fire Service query buildings over a certain height within a set area. Other examples include identifying addresses within a set distance of a river or other point of interest, or planning public transport diversions.”

Consistency of reporting is vital

The Department for Transport (DfT) published Emergency Preparedness, Response & Recovery: Identifying lessons learned by the UK highway sector from extreme weather emergencies in 2021 – that’s the paper that opened with the quote from FEMA’s Fugate about adaptation.

In this paper, DfT argued that it’s essential for “hazard-impacted authorities to present DfT … with a coherent ‘ask’ following emergencies”.

The development of a Rapid Impact Assessment guidance and methodology program that could be implemented consistently across departments, disasters and geographies was funded.

This Rapid Impact Assessment “provides shared situational awareness and supports the development of repair/funding priorities”, the paper said.

In the past, some Local Highway Authorities had missed out on funding opportunities because they didn’t use the same structured approach to impact assessment as others, the report said.

Make simple early-warning systems widely available

To reduce the human cost of such events as floods, citizens of any advanced nation should expect an elegant but simple technological solution that at least offers them warning when danger is approaching, says Lamia Messari-Becker, Professor of civil engineering at the University of Siegen.

Simple, digital flood alarms should be made available, she says. Similar to smoke alarms, they should be an inclusion in any at-risk property.

Dr Lisa Thalheimer, from Princeton University’s Centre for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment agrees, saying locally customised information distributed to mobile phones should be the least communities expect.

Mitigating the human cost in the UK can also dramatically reduce the ongoing costs of disasters, including loss of productivity, burdens on the health system, mental health tolls and disruption to lives and careers.