UK towns harness nature vs rising flood risk

In a stream near Leicester in central England, six volunteers in waterproof overalls and boots busily reinforced mini wooden structures designed to combat the rising flooding threat.

The city, like many others in the UK, has experienced several intense rainfall events in recent years, which have caused significant damage.

Alert to climate change, which intensifies these events, authorities are strengthening their defenses and turning to solutions more sympathetic with the environment.

With their feet firmly planted on the bed of the Saffron Brook, a tributary of the River Soar that runs through Leicester, the volunteers ensured the structures’ wooden bundles were securely anchored.

These structures create bends that “change the behavior of the river” and slow down water in stretches where it currently flows “straight and very fast,” said Dan Scott, who leads the program at the Trent Rivers Trust, a local group working to protect rivers.

He regularly oversees the installation of new facilities.

A few months ago, the trust dug a pond on a river near the town of Loughborough and installed dozens of leaky wooden barriers to better protect downstream houses that flooded in the past.

These techniques are “complementary to traditional flood defenses” such as retention basins and canals that are increasingly under strain, Scott said.

They “help to store some of that water upstream so that those traditional flood defenses don’t get overwhelmed, and if they do, it’s not as quickly as if these features weren’t in place,” he added.

They also help to maintain biodiversity.

More than 6.3 million properties are at risk of flooding in the UK, and this figure will rise to more than eight million by 2050, according to a recent government report.

“Flooding is a really urgent societal problem,” said Steven Forest, director of the Flood Risk Management Program at the University of Hull.