The Summer After the Floods: a real-time examination of the social, economic and environmental dimensions of flood recovery and resilience

The scale, diversity, persistence and severity of UK flooding events in the winter of 2013/14 are unprecedented in recent history. This provides a unique opportunity to study, in real-time, the factors that enable or inhibit fast and effective flood recovery from the perspectives of businesses, homeowners, local communities and environmental quality. As such, this study is ideally suited to the ESRC Pilot Urgency Mechanism funding scheme.

This research brings together a multi-disciplinary team drawn from business and management studies, human geography and environmental science to examine the 2013/14 UK floods. By bringing together three distinct theoretical lenses (i.e. business resilience, social justice and hydrological characterisation), the project seeks to gain a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the ways in which communities, businesses and policy makers are recovering from recent floods and are preparing to reduce the impacts of future flood events.

The project's core research design is a comparative cross-case analysis of four diverse sites in the UK that have experienced significant flood events in 2014: Worcester, Basingstoke, the Somerset Levels, and Staines. The sites have been selected as they represent i) high variance in the type of flooding (i.e. surface and ground water), ii) rural and urban regions, and iii) different levels of prior experience of flood events. There is a lack of comparative evidence on how businesses and communities recover from and plan for future flood events, on how policy responses influence processes of recovery, and of how tensions and interdependencies between the social, economic and environmental dimensions of flood recovery and preparedness arise and are resolved. Rapid fieldwork (i.e. both proximate to the phases of recovery and future planning) will make it possible to gather robust empirical evidence about the impacts of approaches to recovery and preparedness and in particular the tensions or synergies created in attempting to achieve business resilience, social justice and environmental quality.

Additionally, this project represents a rare opportunity to study flood recovery in real-time and to evaluate the impacts (intended and unintended) of policy interventions into flooding and their interactions with 'bottom-up' processes of business and community response. In particular, there is an immediate need to reflect on the implications of the new policy paradigm of 'Natural Flood Management', which has prioritised capital projects in urban areas and relative non-intervention in rural areas. This project is therefore distinctive in the following ways: real-time rather than retrospective; capturing both recovery and preparedness in action; multi-disciplinary and, within disciplines, multi-method; comparative rather than single site or flood type.

To realise our core aim to inform business, community and policy responses to flooding, we will work directly with our target non-academic beneficiaries from the outset of the project and will incorporate their feedback, requirements and solutions throughout the duration of the research. Project findings will be made available and accessible via the following platforms: Twitter; project microsite and discussion area; public briefs (written and video); Podcasts; business self-help guides and non-technical reports; interactive stakeholder workshops; dissemination events at the Houses of Parliament organised in collaboration with the Industry and Parliament Trust, and in the EU at the University of Birmingham Brussels Office. Continuity of the research beyond the urgent period will be supported by the creation of a legacy group comprised of academics, practitioners and community members that will provide the basis for future research.