Examining Risks of Coastal Flooding to Port Systems

Coastal flooding is one of the most serious environmental risks to the UK. Despite much research on general risks of coastal flooding, knowledge about how flooding affects the estuary port systems that sustain much of the UK economy is more limited.

The proposed research aims to examine risks of coastal flooding to port systems and the supply chains that they sustain throughout the UK. As an exploratory study in a short term, the research considers two major ports (Dover and Immingham) that are subject to flooding risks. The supply chains considered are food import systems that are clearly of critical importance to the UK. The project has the following objectives:
-Predicting time evolution of potential coastal flooding
-Translating risks of flooding to risks in port infrastructure systems
-Translating risks of flooding to risks in import logistics systems
-Engineering risk communication between flood forecasters and infrastructure users/owners

The core stakeholders of this project are the Maritime Resilience Planning and Consequence Management Team of the Department for Transport (DfT; UK central government), the ports of Immingham and Dover and John Dora Consulting. Network Rail and the Food Storage and Distribution Federation have agreed to make comments on our outputs and send officers to our workshops. The results of the projects will help their policy formation as well as development of Emergency Procedures and Business Continuation Plans. In particular, the results will be used in the UK government's cross-departmental initiative on UK maritime, food and energy resilience to a tidal surge.