The Dynamic Drivers of Flood Risk (DRIFT)

The cost of floods averages more than £2 billion annually in the UK and is feared to keep rising as the climate changes. However, there are critical gaps in our understanding of what drives flood nonstationarity, affecting stakeholders' ability to make planning decisions about appropriate levels of flood risk management, land use, or infrastructure required to protect populations.

This project - the Dynamic Drivers of Flood Risk (DRIFT) - has been designed to address crucial challenges in understanding past and future changes in flood properties to improve decision-making support. The overarching aim is to develop a unified understanding of flood nonstationarity from the past into the future (1970-2070), transitioning seamlessly from short to long timescales. DRIFT will develop the first past-present-future prediction system allowing stakeholders to generate robust scenarios of drifting flood characteristics from the past into the future.

Probabilistic models will be developed describing the influence of changing weather characteristics, climate, engineering structures, and land cover on flood properties, such as flood peaks, return periods, probabilities, durations and extent. Past trends in flood properties will be seamlessly linked with future climate forecasts, predictions and projections, over short- to long-term horizons. Future changes in flood properties will be estimated using a multi-model ensemble approach that seamlessly combines climate timescales (seasonal forecasts, decadal predictions, and multi-decadal projections) and land cover scenarios (such as urbanisation or afforestation), as well as management decisions.

This past-present-future prediction system will be integrated within a decision support framework, providing simple and intuitive ways to display complex information on flood evolution. DRIFT's aim is to support stakeholders in making the best planning decisions to manage flood risks and achieve other co-benefits. A user-friendly decision support system will be co-developed to visualise changing flood characteristics under different scenarios. This tool will provide seamless information and visualisations of changing flood properties from the near to far future, for a range of climate and land cover scenarios.

DRIFT has an iterative structure, with Phase I focusing on co-developing the models and decision support software with five key groups of UK flood stakeholders and project partners. Phase II subsequently expands to other regions of the world where observational streamflow data are available. The long-term aim is to develop robust decision-making support on the evolution of flood characteristics, providing direct benefits for societies globally.