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Flood Warning Improvements Overview

Summary

Agency Board Report Number: SEPA 38/23

This position statement provides the Board with an overview of the actions that are underway to ensure our flood forecasting and warning service remains sustainable and keeps pace with our changing climate.

Introduction

The Board have considered and discussed over a number of sessions how to ensure the sustainability of our flood forecasting and warning service in the face of climate change with anticipated record rainfall and extreme flood events increasing in frequency.

Avoid Adapt Warn

Responding to our changing climate is extremely challenging and requires many different approaches. Flood warning is only one of these. To reduce the impact of flooding we also need to: help Scotland avoid building new communities in areas at risk of flooding, help communities adapt by putting water management at the centre of planning and development decisions, strengthening Scotland’s network of defences, and adopting nature-based solutions and property level protection. A carefully balanced approach across all of these is required. We distribute our work across three themes – Avoid, Adapt and Warn. No country can fully eliminate the risk of flooding, so flood warning will always be required as a last line of defence to save lives and minimise the impact on livelihoods. Our aim is to maximise our impact by using the most effective mix of all of these approaches. Too much of a focus on flood warning will mean too many decisions are left to times of emergency potentially reducing our overall effectiveness.

Background

SEPA has been continuously innovating and improving its flood forecasting and warning service to ensure it keeps pace with climate change, increased public attention and improvements in science, technology, and the communication of risk. Examples of recent improvements at the forefront of global innovation include:

• The new Future Flood Incident Messaging Service. This significant new contract delivers increased capacity to issue flood warning messages in novel ways across areas which can be defined dynamically to meet the requirements of a particular flood event, or by integrating with the new cell broadcasting technology such as the UK emergency alert initiative. It also provides significant efficiency improvements in managing Floodline customers registration – meeting Digital Scotland Service Standard – and provides some automation of flood warning messages. The first enhancements have already been delivered with the launch of Scotland Flood Forecast, automated link to twitter and upload of the Flood Guidance Statement into Met Office Hazard Manager. More developments are underway for completion in 2023/2024, including supporting water scarcity.
• The Scottish Flood Forecast is a public version of our daily Flood Guidance Statement issued to Civil Contingency responders. It was created after user research was undertaken with the public, community flood groups, emergency responders, our partners and employees. This identified a need for the public to receive flood information earlier than our existing regional Flood Alerts and local Flood Warnings in a simple and clear way and to have the ability to check if no significant flooding is expected. The product can be used by anyone interested in finding out at a national level whether flooding is likely to happen across Scotland over the next three days and what to do next. The public can check it at any time.
• We are trialling a new non-contact way to measure very high flows in rivers via cameras, and to measure the scale of floods via satellites. Both innovations will radically improve health and safety for SEPA officers and the quality of information available to help us learn from each flood event and continuously improve the service across our three themes avoid, adapt and warn.

Our broad approach to innovation is laid out in our Flood Forecasting and Warning Development Framework 2022 - 2028. These innovations are continuous, but we have identified four additional areas where we need to improve. These are summarised below:

• Partnership approach: increased support for workstreams within the Scottish Government’s Programme for Government with us helping support strategy development and training for partners. This workstream is resourced from within the existing flooding and resilience teams in SEPA. It has already delivered two training and collaboration events with staff from the Scottish Government. We are currently supporting the development of the Scottish Government flooding trategy, the climate change adaptation programme and the new Water Bill. All of these will help inform a common understanding of the level of SEPA service on flooding that Scotland wants and is prepared to support.
• Information on flood defence assets: improved understanding of flood risk from the latest climate change predictions, flood defence assets, the number of properties they protect and their resilience to climate change is required. This workstream is resourced from within SEPA’s avoid hub. One contract which is nearing completion will allow us to publish better information this year on flood risk from wave action in the Outer Hebrides and North East Scotland. The enhanced predictive capacity for wave action has already delivered more accurate warnings during the flood event of March 2023. Capital funds have been allocated and contracts are in the process of being let, for two further enhancements: £300k for the coast of south east Scotland and £250k for a pilot project to improve flood defence assets information in the Borders of Scotland. Both are due for delivery in 2024/2025.
• Infrastructure: The operational robustness of SEPA’s flood forecasting and warning infrastructure particularly its gauging infrastructure and real time data systems requires upgrading. This work is resourced from within SEPA’s hydrometry hub. Considerable progress has been made in this area; £600k of capital assets have been allocated to key engineering improvements at 36 gauging stations, and almost half of this money has been spent or committed already. In addition, £75k capital funds have been allocated or improved resilience in the real time data flows and alarm systems for flood warning.
• Staffing: The training, strength and depth of our technical expertise requires improvement to enhance our resilience for the more frequent, severe and long lasting events we are beginning to experience. A review identifying the way forward has been undertaken. Several new critical roles have already been put in place to strengthen our overall resilience. This flooding review will feed in into the ongoing outcome based review currently being undertaken by the Corporate Leadership Team (CLT) into the allocation of our grant in aid (GiA) funding as an investment/reallocation request. This will support CLT in making choices about the level of investment/reallocation of resources versus the level of flooding service hat is practical, realistic and feasible against SEPA’s wider range of priorities for delivery in protecting Scotland’s environment. This work will determine the size and scale of future phases and will feed into a four-year programme of improving flooding service resilience.

Recommendations

The Board is asked to note the progress on continuing to develop the resilience of our flood forecasting and warning service so that it is fit for future challenges. Further updates on enhancements and improvements to the Flood Forecasting and Warning service will be reported to the Board as appropriate.