Well-adapted built enviornment and communities system

Risk to the system from climate change: heat, flooding, sea-level rise, and coastal erosion impact the built environment and communities.

Objective

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Settlements, buildings, and communities are fit for purpose and are durable places to live and work.

Proposed target: by 2050, the most vulnerable populations should be protected from overheating and most homes in the UK should not overheat.
Proposed target: by 2050, the total number of residential properties impacted by flooding (from all sources) in the UK should remain no greater than today’s level. Levels of risk should be below today’s level in all parts of the UK where this is technically feasible and cost-effective.

Actions

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Settlement-scale: catchment scale flood defences, urban green infrastructure, sustainable drainage systems, community preparedness, and coastal change management.

Catchment scale flood defences: these defences can be a mix of engineered ‘hard’ defences and natural defences.
- Engineered flood defences, which involve building artificial structures and walls to control water, are highly effective at reducing risk from flooding. For every £1 currently invested in flood defences (including maintenance of existing defences), around £8 of damages are avoided.
- Natural flood management (NFM) protects, restores, and mimics natural processes to slow and store water. This helps reduce the risk of floodwater in the surrounding built environment. NFM can reduce peak river flows by up to 10% and has been shown to have benefit-cost ratios of between 3:1 and 5:1 across Great Britain, based on reduced flood damage alone.
Urban green infrastructure: for example, street trees, parks, wildlife areas, and waterways. These can provide natural cooling and shade during hot weather, and can absorb water in heavy rainfall, reducing surface water runoff. These measures have co-benefits for biodiversity, health, and wellbeing. However, they can have longer timescales for being put in place and can be relatively expensive.
Sustainable drainage systems (SuDS): green roofs, permeable paving, swales, soakaways, and rain gardens can slow water runoff and allow water to soak into the ground or evaporate. This reduces the likelihood of surface water flooding.
Community preparedness: preparing for extreme weather events such as heatwaves and flooding events depends on people understanding their heat and flood risk, taking pre-emptive action, and responding to flood and weather warnings.
Coastal change management: managing changes resulting from sea level rise and coastal erosion can include nature-based solutions to enhance natural habitats or physical structures to protect coastal land. Around 18% of the UK coast is currently protected in some way. In some cases, managed coastal retreat may be required, where it is no longer feasible or cost-effective to defend the current coastline.

These adaptation actions are connected with adaptation in the land system and in the water and wastewater system.

Building-scale: cooling measures, property level flood resilience, and insurance.

Cooling measures: active cooling provides a way of reliably reducing internal temperatures to comfortable levels and will be needed to complement passive measures in some homes to manage extreme temperatures. Active cooling is cost-effective and can be provided by heat pumps as well as by portable units and other solutions, meaning households can have both clean heating and cooling. Passive cooling measures (such as ventilation and blinds) can reduce temperatures inside homes, in some cases by 14°C. However, in extreme temperatures, they may not be effective at maintaining comfortable temperature levels indoors due to building fabric and design. They are also relatively expensive and can take a longer period to install. As a result, they may be more appropriate for new buildings rather than retrofitting to existing ones.
Property level flood resilience (PFR): PFR includes measures to stop water entering homes (such as flood doors, barriers, and air brick covers) and measures to reduce the damage caused by floodwater (such as raised electrics and tiled flooring). By targeting the most vulnerable homes, PFR can have a quicker impact than construction of defences which can take several years. PFR results in shorter recovery time after experiencing flooding. PFR can also reduce stress and anxiety felt about flooding by residents, giving them some control over their own flood defence.
Insurance: houses and other buildings are still expected to face damages from storms and flooding in the future climate from extreme weather events, even with preventive adaptation actions. The risk of subsidence will also increase in future, as cycles of wetter winters and drier summers affect soil conditions. Insurance supports building owners to recover after these events. Government schemes, such as Flood Re, can support the insurance industry to ensure all households are insured and insurance is affordable.

These adaptation actions are connected with adaptation in the health system and in the economy and finance system.

Enablers

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Resources: for funding adaptation, and the materials and skills required for installing and maintaining adaptation measures.

Actions in the built environment require sufficient funding, materials, and workforce capacity. This includes for building and installing measures and then maintaining them at their design standard. Settlement-scale actions are typically funded by government. Building-scale actions are more likely to be funded by the owners or occupiers, in some cases with support from government-backed schemes.

Clear plans, roles, and responsibilities: clear accountability for delivering and maintaining overheating and flooding adaptation, especially surface water drainage.

These should ensure accountability and ensure that adaptation measures are delivered and maintained consistently, across both flooding and overheating. The roles and responsibilities for flooding are different in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and sometimes require collaboration where catchment areas fall across national or local authority borders.

Engagement, awareness, and support: information for communities and local stakeholders to enable household-level actions and long-term planning for settlement-scale adaptation.

Ensuring communities are engaged and well-informed about future climate risks and extreme weather events can enable household-level adaptation actions and decisions. In addition, long-term planning for settlement-scale adaptation actions requires local stakeholder engagement, for example when proposing installation of flood defences or potential coastal retreat.

Policies

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Planning policy and building regulations: that ensure new buildings and developments are safe and suitable for future climate conditions.

These are the main policy levers for ensuring that new buildings and developments will not be at risk of overheating, flooding, or damage from coastal erosion, subsidence, or landslides. Spatial planning, flood and coastal erosion risk management, and building regulations are fully devolved. The coast is covered by non-statutory plans developed by local councils, coastal groups, and agencies.

Across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, spatial planning policy includes steps to assess flood risk, direct new development away from the areas at highest risk, and ensure safety for the development lifetime. Expert agencies, such as the Environment Agency (EA), Natural Resources Wales (NRW), Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), and the Department for Infrastructure (DfI) are statutory consultees on planning applications for flood risk. Flood risk is often considered across different regulations and the complexity of tests, exemptions, and guidance for flooding creates ambiguity, particularly for managing surface water flooding.

Buildings standards can require that buildings are designed and constructed to ensure safety from flooding (for example, in Scotland’s regulations) and overheating (for example, Part O of the Buildings Regulations in England and Wales).

Long-term government funding and plans: to deliver flood risk and coastal management strategies to meet targets.

Public funding, of around £1.6–£2.2 billion per year across the UK, is needed to maintain, as a minimum, today’s level of flood risk through new projects, maintaining and upgrading existing flood defences, and increasing drainage. Government will need to plan proactively, facilitate information sharing, and provide support to local authorities and households where significant flooding or coastal erosion risk remains. This could include the potential need to relocate some communities

Building-level policies: support to enable vulnerable households to install cooling measures that align with heat decarbonisation where possible.

There are some existing building-level policies which can support households to retrofit some adaptations, including grants which include insulation retrofit and air-to-air heat pumps.

After a household experiences flooding, some home insurance policies include the ‘Build Back Better’ scheme, which includes property resilience measures as part of flood repairs and is available across the UK.