Abstract. The National Flood Risk Assessment (NaFRA) for England and Wales was initially undertaken in 2002 with frequent updates since. NaFRA has become a key source of information on flood risk, informing policy and investment decisions as well as communicating risk to the public and insurers. To make well informed decisions based on these data, users rightfully demand to know the confidence they can place in them. The probability of inundation and associated damage however cannot be validated in the traditional sense, due the rare and random nature of damaging floods and the lack of a long (and widespread) stationary observational record (reflecting not only changes in climate but also the significant changes in land use and flood defence infrastructure that are likely to have occurred). To explore the validity of NaFRA this paper therefore provides a bottom-up qualitative exploration of the potential errors within the supporting methods and data. The paper concludes by underlining the need for further research to understand how to robustly validate probabilistic risk models.
Floods can cause severe and rapid changes in rivers. They can erode river banks and deposit vast quantities of sediment. This can impact on land-use, infrastructure (such as bridges and culverts), and properties where flood risk is increased. Understanding these natural processes, and where they are more likely to occur, can inform risk assessment, and identify opportunities to work with nature. Approaches to identify geomorphological actitivity in rivers have been reviewed to determine which could have potential to create a nationwide assessment of river channel change in England and Wales. Two existing approaches and two novel approaches have been tested and validated against fluvial audits to determine how well they identify geomorphological activity. One of the new approaches developed though the research was used to create a national scenario library of erosion maps representing different sediment sizes, channel roughness, and rainfall probabilities. Such information could be used to plan for future change, prioritise channel maintenance activity to locations with greatest risk or opportunity, and deliver sustainable flood risk and environment management.
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