In recent years, through the availability of remotely sensed data and other national datasets, it has become possible to conduct national-scale flood risk assessment in England and Wales. The results of this type of risk analysis can be used to inform policy-making and prioritisation of resources for flood management. It can form the starting point for more detailed strategic and local-scale flood risk assessments. The national-scale risk assessment methodology outlined in this paper makes use of information on the location, standard of protection and condition of flood defences in England and Wales, together with datasets of floodplain extent, topography, occupancy and asset values. The flood risk assessment was applied to all of England and Wales in 2002 at which point the expected annual damage from flooding was estimated to be approximately £1 billion. This figure is comparable with records of recent flood damage. The methodology has subsequently been applied to examine the effects of climate and socio-economic change 50 and 80 years in the future. The analysis predicts increasing flood risk unless current flood management policies, practices and investment levels are changed -up to 20-fold increase in real terms economic risk by the 2080s in the scenario with highest economic growth. The increase is attributable primarily to a combination of climate change (in particular sea level rise and increasing precipitation in parts of the UK) and increasing economic vulnerability.

Sound flood risk management decision making is underpinned by flood risk analysis. Current methods applied at regional and local scales are often limited in their consideration of the potential for defences to fail. Ultimately this can lead to underestimates of the true risk and subsequent difficulties in justifying mitigation measures such as maintenance and replacement of defences. A methodology has been developed for assessing flood risk arising from fluvial and coastal sources that explicitly considers defence failures represented through fragility curves. This method requires consideration of flooding scenarios involving multiple defence section failures and flood events ranging in severity. It has therefore been necessary to develop a purpose-specific flood spreading method that is capable of simulating many flood events in practical timescales. The method has been applied to the Thames Estuary, where outputs including spatial maps of flood risk and defences attributed with residual risk have been used to support decisions relating to strategic flood risk management over the coming century.

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Flood risk analysis increasingly involves the integration of a full range of loading conditions as well as multiple defence system states, overlaid by uncertainty analysis. This type of analysis involves the simulation of many thousands of flood events. To keep model runtimes to practical levels an efficient yet robust flood inundation model is required. To accommodate this need a rapid flood spreading model (RFSM) has been developed that utilises the availability of good quality topography data and advanced GIS techniques. This paper describes recent improvements to the RFSM that have focused on incorporating additional physical processes within the spreading algorithm (multiple spilling and friction). This improved model is applied to a number of different sites with comparisons made to a more complex hydrodynamic model. The findings of this comparison demonstrate a good degree of similarity between the RFSM and more complex models, with a significantly reduced runtime overhead.