News Aug 11, 2022

Helping the Environment Agency Deliver its Flood, Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy

一糖心logo米菲兔 is working on three major contracts with the Environment Agency, helping to understand flood from all sources, as well as coastal erosion risk, and plan for a resilient future for people, communities and businesses.

Thames Barrier

一糖心logo米菲兔 is providing expert support to the Environment Agency on three key national projects: National Flood Risk Management 2 (NaFRA2), Long-Term Investment Scenarios (LTIS) 2025 and National Coastal Erosion Risk Mapping 2 (NCERM2), which will ensure long-term resilience to the U.K. environment and communities.

National Flood Risk Management 2

Together with the Environment Agency, and a small group of industry and academic experts, we are designing, developing and implementing the National Flood Risk Assessment 2 (NaFRA2), a pioneering cloud computing system that will help create a step-change in the quality and scope of England's national flood risk information.

Two years into the five-year project, we are progressing this important and time-sensitive effort, which will support a wide range of Environment Agency flood risk management activities 鈥 from national evidence and strategy to local community, property and asset-level risk information. NaFRA2 will bring together vast quantities of diverse data 鈥 modelling, properties, terrain and third-party data 鈥 to tell a coherent story about risk at any scale and anywhere in England. As well as the richness of the data and breadth of scenarios represented by NaFRA2, it is differentiated by being a live system that will continue to be updated with new data and methods to meet the evolving needs of its users. We are engaging with the Agency and its wide base of users as key stakeholders to ensure that the system and its data can be intuitively accessed to meet a broad range of business needs. Although we are used to working on complex projects, this is a unique combination of challenging scalable data manipulation, cutting edge method implementation, user-focused design and national-scale flood modelling. Considerations of how this tool can stand the test of time, making it usable in decades to come to help manage flood risk, including from climate change impacts, are at the heart of this work.

鈥淎s an organization, the Environment Agency has always been very good at producing numerous models and data nationally and locally,鈥 says Environment Agency Project Executive Ben Lukey. 鈥淣aFRA2 is going to help us make much better use of what we have, providing for the first time a mechanism for selecting the right model outputs to provide the best flood risk information for any location. Two years into the project, it鈥檚 brilliant to now see early prototypes of the interface emerging. I鈥檓 particularly excited to be able to show users how we鈥檒l be able to share information about future flood risk as climate change starts to have a serious impact, to give everyone a chance to adapt to increasing flood risks and build resilience.鈥

Graphic showing the development of a secure cloud environment through NaFRA2

Development of a secure cloud environment through NaFRA2

Long-Term Investment Scenarios 2025

The Long-Term Investment Scenarios (LTIS) program seeks to understand the national-scale investment needs to manage flood risk in England, providing a critical evidence base for the Environment Agency鈥檚 national business and helping it to secure government funding for flood risk management. Making full use of NaFRA 2 and National Coastal Erosion Risk Mapping 2 (NCERM2), this project looks beyond the present day to understand how risk and flood and coastal erosion management investment needs would evolve under different scenarios over the next 100 years.

LTIS explores the value of investment through a range of climate change, development control and investment scenarios. expanded on previous work by exploring more extreme climate change scenarios, more realistic development control scenarios, an expanded range of responses and a more detailed exploration of wider impacts. LTIS 2025 in contrast is a whole-scale refresh, improving methods, being aligned to the Environment Agency鈥檚 and making use of the latest R&D.

This new analysis will push the boundary of what is possible through the LTIS framework, by adopting innovative methods and data analysis coupled with digital tools for communicating results.

Working in partnership with the , , and , 一糖心logo米菲兔 is providing expert advice on a number of interconnected topics, including climate change, flood and coastal resilience and adaptive planning. We鈥檝e been involved with the LTIS program since its inception in the mid-2000s.

鈥淲e are looking forward to working together on some challenging and ambitious questions on this project,鈥 says Environment Agency Project Executive Dr Mike Steel. 鈥淭his will enable LTIS 2025 to make significant advances in our understanding of future policy and investment choices, to improve resilience and adaptation to future climate risks.鈥

LTIS2019 visualization of concept

LTIS2019 visualization of concept