South-east London is guinea pig for UK in extreme weather research from University of Greenwich
South-east London is to be a guinea pig for the rest of the country in new research to find out how prepared householders and businesses are for an extreme weather event, and what they need to do to cope with floods, heat waves and high winds.
Built environment experts at the University of Greenwich have won a £556,000 grant from the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to lead a research project involving teams at Greenwich and five other universities.
Professor Keith Jones, from the University of Greenwich, says: “Climate change means that extreme weather events are becoming more common, with devastating effect: 55,000 thousand homes and 6,000 businesses were damaged in last year’s floods, leading to insurance claims of over £3 billion. The heat wave of 2003 caused the premature death of about 40,000 people in Europe.”
He says: “At the moment people are often unsure who has responsibility for cleaning up their property after a flood, or what exactly their insurance will cover. While emergency services have a duty to protect life, and utility companies to restore essential services, it is down to communities themselves to make plans and work together to minimise the impact of an extreme weather event.”
Looking at local people, businesses and policy-makers in Greenwich, Bexley, Lewisham, Croydon and Bromley, researchers will study how they might better cope in a series of potential bad-weather incidents.
“We develop solutions by researching with people rather than on them,” says Professor Jones. “There are some basic things which people can do, from having a waterproof box ready for treasured possessions, to knowing who to call to pump out their cellar. Critical businesses (needed by households to aid their recovery) can plan to move plant and equipment to sites above the flood level. Supermarkets can think about how they will transport essential food supplies if the roads are blocked. And organisations can move their data and power trunking from floor level to ceiling.”
The project, “Community Resilience to Extreme Weather Events through Improved Local Decision Making”, is part of a wider £1.6M EPSRC-funded programme coordinated by Cranfield University. Four other teams of universities will study the likelihood of extreme weather events, where they are most likely to occur, their impact on physical infrastructure like buildings and roads, and the effect on local economies and populations.
At the end of the three-year programme, toolkits will be published giving practical advice and policy guidance. Lessons learned in London will be applied to other parts of the UK, with computer models that allow every area in the country to factor in their own unique risks, depending on the situation of rivers, population density, nature of economic activity and so on.
Editors’ notes:
The £1.6M EPSRC-funded programme is called Community Resilience to Extreme Weather (CREW) and coordinated by Dr Gavin Wood at Cranfield University. The other four research groups are being led by Cranfield University, De Montfort, Glasgow University and Newcastle University and involve a total of 14 UK universities.
Cranfield University is a wholly postgraduate institution with a worldwide reputation for excellence and expertise in aerospace, automotive, defence, engineering, environment and water, health, management and manufacturing. The University is made up of the following Schools: Cranfield Health, School of Management, School of Applied Sciences, School of Engineering, and The Defence College of Management and Technology at Shrivenham. For more information visit www.cranfield.ac.uk
Professor Keith Jones is leader of the Sustainable Buildings Research Group in the School of Architecture & Construction at the University of Greenwich. The Group was established in 1996 to coordinate research activity relating to the development and maintenance of a sustainable built environment. For more about courses and research in the School of Architecture & Construction, visit: http://www.gre.ac.uk/schools/arc
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