News & Events

Project Team: Clare Johnson, Sylvia Tunstall and Edmund Penning-Rowsell

Aims and objectives:
To provide the first insight into the ‘socially just’ nature of flood and coastal erosion risk management policy and decision-making,

Two new projects just starting up are those on Improving Institutional and Social Responses to Flooding and Supporting the development of a Social Science Strategy for the FCERM R&D programme. Both projects are funded from the Defra/Environment Agency Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management R&D Programme.

Colin Green, Theresa Wilson, Trevor Masterson and Neil Boothby (2006).

An assessment of the additional flood losses associated with groundwater flooding: a report to Hampshire County Council and Winchester City Council. [PDF 52pgs 715KB]

Sally Priest will be working on the EU-funded FLOODsite project which aims to bring together managers, researchers and practitioners from over 30 partner organisations across Europe to achieve the goal of integrated flood risk management.  The project involves a number of complementary disciplines including the physical, environmental, ecological and socio-economic aspects of flooding from rivers, estuaries and the sea.  Sally is particularly involved in research focussing on innovative methods to understand, model and evaluate flood damages and other flood losses.

Prior to joining the FHRC Sally worked as a Teaching Fellow in the School of Geography at the University of Southampton.  She was employed in a post that supported the School of Geography’s involvement in a £1.5 million JISC/NSF funded DIALOG (Digital Libraries in Support of Innovative Approaches to Learning and Teaching in Geography project) PLUS research project aiming to embed digital teaching resources into the undergraduate curriculum.  Sally is also a joint investigator on the ESRC-funded Small Grant entitled “Behaviour in response to risk: Public response to the Environment Agency flood map.”

Arvind Sareen is the centre's full-time CPD Course Administrator. He co-ordinates, organises and assists in developing several training courses in the areas of flood defence and forecasting which the Centre runs, principally for Environment Agency and organisations whose staff work on these types of projects.

Arvind has administrative experience from the IT and education sectors. He has been involved with running a learning centre, developing teacher guides, preparing proposals for infrastructure bids to schools and examining ICT subjects in the national curriculum.

Christophe Viavattene will be working on two European projects: SWITCH and SPICOSA. In the SWITCH project, he is in charge to develop Decision Support System based on GIS interfaces in collaboration with the Urban Pollution Research Centre (Middlesex University). The DSS will be dedicated to the question of Best Management Practices in Storm Water Management and will be applied to two demonstration cities: Birmingham (UK) and Bello Horizonte (Brezil).

Following his previous research work, he is starting to develop a new project focused on the survey of existing bargaining between stakeholders and farmers. The main objective of this project is to explore the existing scope of, and future potential for bargaining between stakeholders in water resources conflicts management in Europe. This project will be undertaken in at least three main European countries: Great Britain, France and Germany.

Erica Donner will be working on the EU-funded SCOREPP project. The SCOREPP research consortium includes participants from 8 EU member states, and aims to develop comprehensive and appropriate source control strategies that authorities, cities, water utilities and the chemicals industry can employ to reduce emissions of priority pollutants (PPs) from urban areas into receiving waters. The SCOREPP project focuses on the 33 priority substances identified in the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD). Erica is currently focussing her research on the physico-chemical and source characteristics of the target PPs, and on the potential treatment options for emission control.

Prior to joining the FHRC Erica obtained her PhD in Environmental Soil Chemistry from The University of Reading for research into the behaviour of Zn in soils with differing surface charge characteristics. She has also previously been involved in research projects investigating the use of agent-based simulation modelling as a decision support tool for groundwater management, and investigating the effects of land-use on the chemistry and hydrology of coastal acid sulfate soils.

A meeting was attended by Dr Simon McCarthy in Vienna (31st October 2006) to mark the start of a 18 month project funded as part of ERA-NET CRUE exploring the effectiveness and efficiency of non-structural flood risk management measures. In collaboration with the IOER (Leibniz Institute of Ecological and Regional Development), BOKU (Institute for Water Management, Hydrology and Hydraulic Engineering, Vienna) and UFZ (Centre of Environmental Research Leipzig-Halle) corresponding case studies are being undertaken in the UK, Austria and Germany.

A Press Release is available on the CRUE website.