CEP undertaking evaluation of Property Flood Resilience Grant Scheme for Defra

CEP are leading on a new project for Defra to carry out a process and impact evaluation of the Property Flood Resilience (PFR) grant scheme

CEP, in partnership with University of the West of England (UWE) Bristol and Flood Hazard Research Centre (FHRC), Middlesex University, has been awarded a project by DEFRA to carry out a process and impact evaluation of the Property Flood Resilience (PFR) repair scheme to help understand the effect of the scheme on resilience in flood affected council areas.

The PFR repair scheme is activated following severe weather events that impact multiple local authorities, lastly in February 2020 and November 2019. All eligible flooded properties have access to grants through the PFR scheme. To be eligible a council area has to have more than 25 properties flooded.

This project will evaluate how the PFR repair scheme’s delivery process has worked and the impact this has had in areas affected by flooding. The two key questions are:

• How effective are processes employed for delivering the Government Property Flooding Resilience (PFR) repair schemes in 2019 and 2020?

  • What benefits has the scheme delivered?

  • What improvements (if any) could be made?

• What is the impact of the scheme in council areas that have received PFR grants and have flooded since?

  • In these areas, did the resilience measures make a measurable difference and if so, how

  • How does this contrast with areas where flooding has occurred, but PFR has not been utilised?

  • Has the scheme contributed to increase the uptake of PFR?

The project started in August 2021 and will run until August 2022.

For more information, please contact Clare Twigger- Ross (Project Director, CEP) or Rolands Sadauskis (Project manager, CEP).

CEP presenting research on how to work with communities to manage the flood and coastal erosion risks

CEP presenting work undertaken for Defra and the Environment Agency on a flood and coastal erosion risk management research and development framework: working with communities.

Dr. Clare Twigger-Ross and Rolands Sadauskis will be giving a presentation on the work undertaken for Defra and the Environment Agency on ‘Communities and flood and coastal erosion risk management research and development framework’ as part of the ‘Simply Evidence Seminar’ hosted by Defra. This project developed a framework to determine the priorities for future research on how to work with communities to manage the risks associated with flooding and coastal erosion.

The presentation will focus on the approach to develop the framework, including the literature review and gap analysis, and will highlight the priority areas for future research that could shape existing and future research and help prioritise Environment Agency’s research funding. This webinar is organised following the publication of the key outputs from this work:

• Communities and FCERM research framework report

• Literature review report

• One-page summaries for each FCERM activity based on literature review findings,

The aim of the webinar is to raise awareness of the programme and to seek engagement from policy makers with the projects in the priority areas.

For further information, please contact Clare Twigger-Ross (Technical Director) or Rolands Sadauskis (Senior Consultant)

CEP to deliver a new project on the evaluation of Biodiversity Net Gain

CEP has been awarded a new project by Natural England and Defra on the design of an evaluation framework for Biodiversity Net Gain in England

CEP, in partnership with BSG Ecology, Geodata Institute, CECAN and Vivid Economics, has been commissioned by Natural England on behalf of Defra to undertake a new project to design an evaluation framework for Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) in England. The aim of mandatory BNG policy, as set out in the Environment Bill, is to secure a measurable improvement in habitat for biodiversity whilst streamlining the planning process and creating better places for local communities.

The purpose of the evaluation framework is to enable Natural England and Defra to evaluate how BNG is being delivered and understand the impact (environmental, social, and economic) of the BNG policy.

In this project we will conduct a streamlined evidence review to bring together the most up to date relevant evidence on key issues related to BNG. This evidence will feed into the development of the evaluation framework, including setting out the underpinning intervention theory by examining the logic of mandatory BNG and the intervention pathways associated with delivering BNG in practice. Development of the framework will be further supported by work to scope the data requirements and potential sources. The process will be iterative, incorporating a range of stakeholder perspectives from developers, local planning authorities, conservation, amenity and local community NGOs and partnerships as well as central government.

The project started in September 2020 and is expected to run until March 2021.

For more information, please contact Paula Orr (Technical Director, CEP) or Dr Sian Morse-Jones (Principal Consultant, CEP).

CEP evidence review informs Defra Policy Statement on flood and coastal erosion risk

Defra has just published CEP’s ‘Evidence review of the concept of flood resilience’ alongside its Policy Statement which sets out the government’s long-term ambition to create a nation more resilient to flood and coastal erosion. 

Defra published its Policy Statement on flood and coastal erosion risk on 14 July.  An ‘Evidence review of the concept of flood resilience‘ and a summary report of the outcome of the 2019 Flood and coastal erosion: call for evidence (two supporting documents prepared by Collingwood Environmental Planning) were published at the same time.

As set out in the 25 Year Environment Plan, the government intends to boost the long-term resilience of homes, businesses, infrastructure and the environment and reduce harm from natural hazards including flooding and coastal erosion. The National Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy for England, which was laid before Parliament on 14 July, calls for transformational action on resilience and adaptation. The move towards “flood resilience” from “flood risk management” reflects the need to diversify strategies to enable people to live well in the context of floods.

To inform Defra’s Policy Statement, this project reviewed the main frameworks for defining and conceptualising flood resilience, and how such frameworks can be used in a resilience approach for Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management. 

The evidence review involved:

• A Quick Scoping Review covering the main approaches to flood resilience currently in existence and the use of metrics to implement resilience approaches

• Two evidence review and policy implementation workshops involving FCERM policymakers and cross-government practitioners.

For more information please contact Paula Orr (Technical Director, CEP) or Spela Kolaric (Senior Consultant, CEP).

CEP to attend upcoming virtual Defra/Environment Agency TAG meeting

CEP’s Dr Clare Twigger-Ross will be attending the upcoming virtual Defra/Environment Agency Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Research and Development Theme Advisory Group meeting

Dr Clare Twigger-Ross will be attending the virtual Defra/Environment Agency Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Research and Development Theme Advisory Group meeting on behalf of CEP on 6th May.  This meeting brings together the three advisory groups Policy, Strategy and Investment (PSI), Incident Management and Modelling (IMM), Asset Management (AM) who all support Defra/Environment Agency in their FCERM research and development.  The groups consist of a range of experts from across different areas of flood and coastal erosion risk management. At this meeting the groups will be updated on the latest research and also meet separately to discuss the upcoming research programme. 

Clare has been on a theme advisory group since 2004.  She is currently part of the Policy, Strategy and Investment (PSI) group.

For more information please contact Dr Clare Twigger-Ross (Technical Director).

CEP successfully hosted Communities and FCERM workshop

CEP successfully facilitated a workshop as part of a project to develop a Communities and FCERM R&D Framework

CEP recently facilitated a one day workshop with a range of key stakeholders to consult and engage them in the development of a Communities and FCERM R&D framework. The workshop, organised by the Environment Agency, successfully took place in London on Wednesday 11th March 2020 before government recommendations around COVID-19 came into place.

CEP, in partnership with Flood Hazard Research Centre (FHRC) Middlesex University and HR Wallingford (HRW), have been commissioned by the Environment Agency (EA) to develop a Communities and FCERM R&D Framework. The primary aim of the project is to identify the main research gaps in the area of FCERM through a detailed review of the current science.

Information about the Communities and FCERM R&D framework project can be found here.

For more information, please contact Dr Clare Twigger-Ross (Project Director) or Rolands Sadauskis (Project Coordinator).

CEP reviewing evidence on flood resilience for Defra

CEP is leading an evidence review of flood resilience for Defra and the Environment Agency.

CEP is leading a project to provide an evidence review of flood resilience for Defra and the Environment Agency. The project was commissioned in summer 2019 and is expected to conclude in spring 2020. CEP’s consortium partners are the Flood Hazard Research Centre at Middlesex University and HaskoningDHV UK Ltd.

The government’s 25 Year Environment Plan includes a goal to reduce the risk of harm to people, the environment and the economy from natural hazards including flooding and coastal erosion. “Boosting the long-term resilience of our homes, businesses and infrastructure” is one of the measures by which this will be achieved. Resilience is also central to the Environment Agency’s draft National Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy for England which emphasises the need for ‘climate resilient places’.

The overall objective of the project is to review the concept of flood resilience and how it can be used in a resilience framework for managing flood and coastal erosion risks in England. 

So far the project has:

• Developed evidence from peer-reviewed and grey literature on the main approaches to flood resilience that are currently in use.

• Provided a summary of the responses to Defra’s ‘Call for Evidence on Flooding and Coastal Erosion’ to inform the Government’s policy on flood and coastal erosion resilience.

• Supported engagement of flood risk management policy-makers and practitioners in exploring how resilience concepts, frameworks and metrics could best be implemented in policy and how to address any barriers to implementation.

• Facilitated cross-Government consideration of the different concepts of resilience currently in use, how these could best be aligned and what targets and metrics could be used.  

The results of the research will be published by Defra later this year.

For more information please contact CEP’s Paula Orr (Project Director) or Spela Kolaric (Project Coordinator) for more information.

CEP at the XV International Congress of Environmental Psychology 2019

DR CLARE TWIGGER-ROSS (CEP) PRESENTING KEYNOTE PAPER AT THE XV CONGRESO DE PSICOLOGIA AMBIENTAL-PSICAMB 2019 IN TENERIFE.

Dr Clare Twigger-Ross is giving a keynote talk on Tuesday 16th July at the XV Congreso de Psicologia Ambiental-PSCIAMB: Community, resources and sustainability: the challenge of territories. She will be presenting her paper Building resilience capacities of communities to flood risk: reflections on theory and practice in the UK. The paper draws on research that CEP and associates have carried out for Defra and the Environment Agency over the past decade.  

The conference is being held at the University of la Laguna, Tenerife from 16th – 19th July 2019.

For more information please contact Dr Clare Twigger-Ross (Technical Director).

Building resilience capacities of communities to flood risk: reflections on theory and practice in the UK

Summary:

Climate change will increase the frequency, severity and extent of flooding in the UK with the present 1.8 million people living in areas at significant flood risk predicted to rise to 2.6 million under a 2° scenario and to 3.3 million under a 4° scenario (CCRA, 2017). The health and social impacts of floods have been documented over a number of years (e.g. Walker et al, 2005; Tapsell and Tunstall, 2008) with recent robust studies on the effects on mental health (e.g. Public Health England, 2017;Miljevic et al, 2017) showing the impact to be quite considerable.   Given these negative social impacts it becomes even more important to understand how communities and individuals alongside local professionals (e.g. local authorities, emergency services) might be able to improve or develop greater community resilience. Dr Twigger-Ross together with her colleagues at Collingwood Environmental Planning has been working on projects for the UK government and its agencies since 2005 on aspects of flooding and this paper draws on that work within the framework of community resilience.   Community resilience is a way of thinking about resilience to flooding at a local and place based level, understanding that there will be multiple communities and social networks intersecting in a given flood risk area.  In this paper Cutter et al’s (2010) disaster resilience of place is drawn on to locate  community resilience which is defined as a “set of capacities that can be fostered through interventions and policies, which in turn help  build and enhance a community’s ability to respond, recover  from [and adapt] to disasters”(Cutter et al, 2010).   The capacities examined by Twigger-Ross et al, (2015) are institutional resilience capacities, social resilience capacities, community capital, infrastructure resilience capacities and economic resilience capacities and they will be elaborated on within this paper.  Importantly, in order to meet the challenges of climate change the type of resilience will need to focus on the proactive/transformative type of resilience rather than the reactive/defensive type of resilience.   A number of active interventions have been developed in the UK by to improve levels of resilience capacity, through government and charity funding, together with grassroots interventions emergent after a flood and the factors for their success or otherwise will be discussed in relation to the community resilience framework. Further, it is recognised that the concept of resilience is both complex and contested, not just the opposite of vulnerability and the paper will comment on that, specifically in the context of its use by UK government and its agencies.  Finally, the role and impact of “contract” research and the position of researchers within that will be examined through the paper.

CEP presenting CECAN fellowship work

CEP presenting work on Flood Community Resilience Pathfinder evaluation at Defra Theme Advisory Groups meeting

Dr Clare Twigger-Ross will be giving a brief presentation on her CECAN fellowship work looking at Qualitative Comparative Analysis in relation to the Flood Community Resilience Pathfinder evaluation at the Defra/Environment Agency R&D Theme Advisory Groups meeting in Birmingham on 26th April.

CEP contribute to international Biodiversity Offsetting Book

CEP authors of United Kingdom chapter on biodiversity offsetting

A new international book on Biodiversity Offsetting “Biodiversity Offsets: European Perspectives on No Net Loss of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services” edited by Wolfgang Wende,  Graham  M. Tucker, Fabien Quétier, Matt Rayment and Marianne Darbi has recently been published (March 2018) by Springer, which brings together the work of more than 30 international authors. 

The Chapter “United Kingdom” by Jonathan Baker, Liza Papadopoulou and William Sheate pulls together the current state of the art of biodiversity offsetting in the UK, including across the devolved administrations.  It builds on research undertaken by CEP evaluating the biodiversity offsetting pilot scheme in England in 2012-2014.

For further information please contact Dr Bill Sheate, Technical Director.

CEP at FloodRISK Conference 2016

Photo credit: Flooded River Severn by muffinn on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

CEP at European Conference on Flood Risk Management

CEP has contributed two papers to FloodRisk 2016, the 3rd European Conference on Flood Risk Management, which will be shown in Lyon on 19 and 20 October.  The papers are co-authored by Clare Twigger-Ross, Paula Orr, Katya Brooks and Rolands Sadauskis and draw on evidence from CEP’s evaluation of the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) Flood resilience Community Pathfinders (2013-15).

Dr Clare Twigger-Ross’s presentation on ‘Citizen Involvement in Flood Risk Government: Flood groups and networks’ will be shown on Wednesday 19 October, as part of the session on Disaster Management and Recovery.  A presentation by Paula Orr entitled ‘Pieces of kit are not enough: Flood infrastructure and community resilience’ will be shown on Thursday 20 October, in the session on Vulnerability and Societal Resilience.

After the conference, the presentations will be available on CEP’s website.

CECAN official launch event and workshop

Photo credit:'knot' by Lindsey Turner on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

CECAN official launch event and 2-day Complexity in Evaluation Workshop

The 'Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus' (CECAN), a £3 million research centre hosted by the University of Surrey, is being officially launched at the CECAN Event: Policy Evaluation for A Complex World, taking place on 13th September in London. A panel discussion will encourage debate on the Nexus policy areas at the heart of the Centre's work, and raise critical questions around complexity, evaluation methodologies, and 'what works in practice'. CEP will attend as part of CECAN's coalition of experts and leading UK bodies who will be developing new ways to measure the effectiveness of domestic policies across the energy, environment, water and food Nexus.

Following the launch event, on the 15th & 16th September, a 2 Day Residential 'Complexity in Evaluation' Workshop will take place in Surrey. The workshop will combine participatory design and collaborative problem solving with information and ideas exchange between CECAN and partners. Dr Clare Twigger-Ross and Dr Bill Sheate from CEP will be attending the workshop.

For more information and to sign up to the events please see CECAN's event webpage.

CEP at CECAN workshop on understanding complexity

CEP at CECAN workshop on understanding complexity

CEP's Dr Clare Twigger-Ross and Dr Bill Sheate will participate in a 1 day workshop on 9th June hosted by the Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN) to tackle the question of 'What is complexity?'.

 Discussions will include:

• What are our different understandings of complexity?
• Examples of complexity in policy evaluation and design, and Nexus systems
• What factors in policy processes and Nexus systems make complexity difficult to handle?
• Sharing innovative ideas and approaches
• What tools can we bring/matching of tools to complex problems
• As a policy maker, how do I know I am dealing with a complex problem?

The workshop will focus on some of the real-world policy case studies put forward by CECAN's co-funders and provide an opportunity to plan a wider public 2 day residential workshop in September 2016.

The event is by invitation only.

Clare Twigger-Ross at Defra's Flood Risk Advisory Group

Image by Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

CEP's Dr Clare Twigger-Ross at Defra's Coastal Erosion Risk Management R&D Theme Advisory Group

CEP's Dr Clare Twigger-Ross is attending the Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management R&D Theme Advisory Group organised by Defra. Clare is a member of the Policy, Strategy and Investment Theme Advisory Group. The Advisory Group's meeting is to discuss the research programme in this area for the coming year and to hear about projects that have completed in this area. It is taking place on 16 March at Birmingham.

CEP's Dr Clare Twigger-Ross at Evaluation of Complexity Workshop

Image: 'Maze' by Christina Gallivan on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

CEP’s Dr Clare Twigger-Ross at Evaluation of Complexity workshop

CEP is part of the  consortium of leading UK bodies who have initiated at new national research hub which  will be developing new ways to measure the effectiveness of domestic policies on energy, water, environment and food (the ‘nexus’), and how they affect wider society.

The focus of the Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN) will be to pioneer, test and promote evaluation approaches and methods across the energy, environment and food nexus where complexity presents a challenge to policy interventions, and so contribute to more effective policy-making.

Based at the University of Surrey and launching on 1 March 2016 - prior to a launch event in the summer - CECAN has been backed by £2.45 million of funding provided by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) in collaboration with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra); the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC); the Environment Agency (EA); and the Food Standards Agency (FSA).

Dr Clare Twigger-Ross from CEP will be attending the inception workshop this week Thursday 10 – Friday 11th March.

CEP's evaluation of biodiversity offsetting pilots published

Defra publishes CEP's evaluation of the biodiversity offsetting pilot scheme in England

Defra has published the final evaluation report by CEP [1] of the Biodiversity Offsetting Pilot Scheme in England that ran from April 2012 to March 2014.

Dr Bill Sheate, CEP's Project Director for the evaluation said:

We are delighted that Defra has finally published the biodiversity offsetting evaluation report.  We concluded in our evaluation that whilst biodiversity offsetting has the potential to deliver improvements in biodiversity outcomes it will require additional resources and ecological expertise in local authorities to deliver it.  

Where residual biodiversity loss is identified offsetting will increase costs overall for developers compared to current practice. It is likely that it would, at best, deliver only marginal benefits in terms of streamlining the planning process for agreeing compensation for biodiversity loss.

The final report includes supplementary reports on Indicative Costs of Current Compensation Arrangements for Biodiversity Loss: Illustrative Case Studies (Task 4 Report) and A review of recent biodiversity offsetting practice in Germany

[1] CEP, in association with IEEP, was commissioned to evaluate the biodiversity offsetting pilot scheme between July 2012 and June 2014.