New NERC project: Cities and Sea Level Rise: Flood Hazard Assessment and Adaptation Toolkits
Dr Diane Horn has been awarded a research grant on Cities and Sea Level Rise funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and the Arup Global Research Challenge 2014.
Dr Diane Horn has been awarded a research grant on Cities and Sea Level Rise funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and the Arup Global Research Challenge 2014. This research project is led by Arup, a global firm of consulting engineers, in collaboration with Diane Horn, Professor Nigel Wright in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Leeds, and Professor Hans-Peter Plag in the Department of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Science at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia. This research will bring together current work on flood risk from sea level rise to provide market-focussed guidance for Arup staff around the world to advise cities facing threats to people and infrastructure under rising sea levels. The output will include tools to assess the risk to people and infrastructure from sea level rise, a menu of adaptation strategies and techniques, and case studies and stakeholder involvement from partner cities.
In a world with continuously increasing urban population, much of which concentrates in coastal cities, the predictions of sea level rise resulting from climate change pose an additional - and at times dramatic - threat not just to sustainability but also to cities' survival. Adaptation to future flood risk will require more than structural defences; many cities will not be able to rely on engineering structures for protection and will need to develop a suite of policy responses to increase their resilience to impacts of rising sea level.
Sea level rise is one of the most prominent challenges faced by cities around the world and is an area where Arup has not only a proven track record but also a clear market interest. Arup teams in Water, Planning, GIS, Safety Critical Design and Engineering and Arup International Development have developed processes and tools that share a common agenda to assist communities in becoming more resilient to future shocks and challenges. This project aims to bring Arup's international multi-disciplinary teams together with academic partners to develop a comprehensive, accessible and project delivery focussed methodology that can be applied by any Arup team in any office around the world. To this end, we have established commitments from key cities around the world facing serious challenges from sea level rise to share data and allow Arup to bench test our tools and methods. These cities include Hull, Bristol and Norfolk, Virginia. We are also in discussions with New York and Hong Kong, where Arup has experience in coastal flooding studies.
The main output from this work will be a concise manual to inform Arup staff how to tackle the issue of rising sea levels in cities around the world. The manual will give guidance on:
- Data sources and methodologies for quantifying sea level rise
- The steps that should be taken to identify the most critical and important assets at risk
- Short, medium and long term options on how these cities can make themselves more resilient and better adapted to those risks.
