Managing Borderlands Project
How should we adapt to flooding? Are conventional management solutions sustainable into the future with the predicted increasing frequency and severity of flooding? Can we continue to build engineered solutions in an economic climate of austerity or do we need to look at sustainable alternatives?
The Managing Borderlands project investigated whether new approaches - adaptive flood management - could be developed with stakeholders in communities across the Scottish-English border in the Tweed river catchment. The adaptive flood management concept incorporates new approaches to flood response through soft engineered solutions that mitigate peak water levels alongside increasing resilience of infrastructure and human systems through adaptation. This new concept also incorporates habitat and biodiversity improvements into our response to flooding.
SEI's Participatory Geographic Information Systems methodologies were utilised to develop spatially grounded solutions with representatives of communities affected by recent flooding in the Tweed. Solutions identified were comprised of conventional engineered options - such as building flood walls - and adaptive solutions - such as restoring woodland along riverbanks or increasing moorland water storage. The solutions generated were then validated and expanded with a wider audience at local agricultural shows.
The results indicate new ways of addressing flood water need to be further investigated and adaptive solutions offer a possible way forward that has the support of communities vulnerable to flooding.
Further information
Collaborating organisations: Newcastle University; Tweed Forum; Durham University; SEI York; UNESCO Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science, University of Dundee.
External website: http://www.tweedforum.org/research/borderlands
SEI York Contact(s)