How this English region leads the way for flood prevention

By UK Government

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GovInsider spoke with Neil Dewis, Director of Yorkshire Water, to look at how urban redesign, weather prediction models and nature-based solutions can tackle the issue of urban flooding.

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Yorkshire Water, along with the UK’s Environment Agency and two municipal councils, launched the Living With Water initiative to change urban planning, which used to deal with floods by building underground tanks to hold excess water. “We’re working on changing the whole way we plan water and infrastructure within a city,” Dewis says. “It’s almost a cultural change”.

Second, they have found an age-old solution to help guide the waters. Rather than building concrete dams to stop the flow of water, they are planting trees and other types of foliage as well as getting innovative in working with existing nature-based features.

Third comes the data. Yorkshire Water works with the UK Meteorological Office on complex predictive tools that will help flood response teams prepare. These models can provide “situational awareness by looking at the weather that might be coming in, where the system currently is and what sort of management choices you can make to operate the system,” explains Dewis.

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