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Special Report: Business of Green

Britain Haunted by Risk of Flooding

A former farm in Essex in southeastern England has become a salt marsh after sea walls were broken down. In addition to cutting flood risk, the new wetlands provide a home to wading birds, fish and plant species.Credit...Essex Wildlife Trust

LONDON — Britons are used to griping about the rain, but a series of major floods in recent years has prompted some to ask how ready the nation is to cope with the rising sea levels and increase in storms that are expected to come as the climate warms.

After Hurricane Sandy exposed how poorly prepared much of the U.S. East Coast was for an extremely severe storm, British flood experts say their nation would most likely fare somewhat better. But with budgets tight and the likelihood of further big floods growing, they say officials must stay focused on strengthening defenses, retreating from vulnerable areas where necessary, and protecting infrastructure like power plants and hospitals.

Severe floods have struck frequently around Britain in the past decade and a half, with particularly damaging deluges caused by heavy rain and swollen rivers in 2000, 2007 and 2012.

“These have been floods on a large scale and have been damaging floods, but they haven’t been on a catastrophic scale,” said Jim Hall, a professor of climate and environmental risk at the University of Oxford. “On that kind of a scale, we’re still really untested.” Further complicating matters, the frequency of serious droughts is also expected to rise. Last year, parts of the country were stricken simultaneously by flood and drought, with underground reserves of water depleted by months of dry weather even as heavy rainfall swamped the surface.

Hurricane Sandy, which paralyzed parts of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, came just a few months before the 60th anniversary, in January, of a storm surge in 1953 that killed more than 300 people in Britain and more than 1,700 in the Netherlands. Memories of both should nudge Britain to examine its readiness, experts said.

“Hurricane Sandy was a wake-up call around coastal flooding,” said Pete Fox, the head of strategy and investment at the U.K. Environment Agency. He said that British officials meet regularly with representatives of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and are seeking to learn lessons from the devastation caused by the hurricane, particularly about the vulnerability of critical infrastructure like hospitals and transportation networks.

By all accounts, London is much better placed than New York to weather an extreme storm and coastal surge. New York sits on the coast, its harbor open to the sea, and it was flagged as facing serious and worsening flood risk by a report in 2008 from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. London, on the other hand, lies a few dozen miles inland, and its biggest exposure is through surges of the tidal River Thames. Moreover, the movable steel gates of the Thames Barrier, built after the flood in 1953, were designed to withstand a once-in-a-thousand-year storm.

“We actually raise the barrier far more often nowadays,” Mr. Fox said. “That in itself is a signal of the changes and extremes in our weather that we are seeing.” Even with the barrier, the capital remains vulnerable to the flooding of the many tributaries of the Thames and to street floods that hit when heavy rainfall overwhelms urban drainage systems, Mr. Fox said.

Poor drainage was blamed for floods that devastated the northeastern city of Hull in 2007 and experts say the risk remains high in many British cities, where sewers and pipes are often more than 100 years old.

Upgrades are underway on a piecemeal basis around the country, funded by water companies and the local authorities, but the water industry regulator, Ofwat, said no national plan had been prepared for a wholesale modernization of water infrastructure. David Crichton, a flood expert and adviser in Scotland, said the cost for a nationwide upgrade would be prohibitive.

Coastal areas are also vulnerable. In some places, the authorities have chosen to let the sea retake uninhabited areas, hoping new wetlands will provide a natural barrier and ease pressure on populated zones. On the Blackwater estuary in southeast England, for example, sea walls were broken down in 2002 to let a former farm become salt marsh. As well as cutting flood risk, the local Essex Wildlife Trust said the new wetlands provide a home to wading birds, 14 kinds of fish and plant species like sea lavender.

Opening up new parkland alongside rivers and letting waterways that have been artificially straightened return to their original, winding paths can also lessen the impact of floods.

While hard defenses like walls and flood gates will always be necessary, “it’s expensive and in some places technically unfeasible to keep building river defenses higher and higher,” said David Tickner, the chief adviser on fresh water at the British section of the conservation group WWF. “That’s a lot of concrete. It’s a lot of money.”

The Environment Agency says spending on the construction and maintenance of flood defenses will have to rise to £1 billion, or $1.5 billion, a year by 2035, from £570 million now.

Another worry is flood insurance. Insurers are seeking government help to keep policies affordable for those in high-risk areas, as part of talks to extend an existing public-private deal beyond its scheduled expiration in June. Failure to reach an agreement could put insurance out of reach for as many as 200,000 households, the industry has said.

The floods in 2007 left some parts of Britain under six feet, or 1.8 meters, of water, killing 13 people and costing the economy an estimated £3.2 billion. After the disaster, a review led by Michael Pitt, a local government official and infrastructure planning expert, warned that the risk of more severe events was growing. He urged the government to implement a list of recommendations, including limiting construction in flood plains and getting utilities to better protect power substations.

“Not all of them have been followed up, and I still have some doubt with respect to our capacity to cope with a very large” flood, said Mr. Hall, of Oxford.

While work has been done to protect water treatment plants and other key infrastructure, the London Underground and many hospitals remain vulnerable, he said.

Because of population pressure, “we’ve built more on flood plains than anybody feels really comfortable with,” noted Mr. Fox, of the Environment Agency.

The government is spending nearly £300 million on 93 separate flood defense efforts that start construction this year, while funding from the local authorities and the private sector has contributed £148 million since 2011, the agency said. Nonetheless, Mr. Fox acknowledged, money “is a challenge for all publicly funded programs” in times of austerity.

The benefits are clear, though. Mr. Fox said a £38 million program to protect Carlisle, in northwest England, after severe flooding in 2005, paid for itself in one night of heavy rainfall in 2009.

Politically, however, it is hard to win funds for projects that guard against future hazards rather than providing immediate benefit, Mr. Hall noted. “Investing in flood defenses is an investment in risk reduction, and that is sometimes a harder case to make,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on   in The International Herald Tribune. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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