Winter Flooding: A Warning About Climate Change

Winter Flooding: A Warning About Climate Change

Every year for hundreds, well, thousands of years, winter has seen flooding here. Why? Well, we are not far above sea level. Low-lying land, basically. This means it should be wetlands and moors. Hills and high areas stay dry, which is why the people who settled here originally built on them. They built settlements around rivers, not right in the flood zones.

Humans, being clever folks, have done various things to make more land dry and livable. Not just that, but farmable. It turns out that a wet winter makes for great farmland when mixed with a warm summer. The minor problem here is that wetter land delays when you can plant and grow things. Then, a hotter, dry summer comes along and the crops just die.

The thing is, the climate has changed. The amount of rain has changed. Models projected rainfall we’re now seeing 20 years earlier than predicted. That should cause alarm, really. It’s making certain bits of farming unviable and causing flooding, coastal erosion, and more. It’s forcing us to rethink a ton of things and take action now before it gets even worse. Yet no action has been taken, really. Not on the sort of scale that’s needed.

Why? Well, politics, really. So far it has impacted a small area, but that could grow and the numbers could be huge. We’re letting a few take the burden for now. The majority don’t see the problem just yet. Worse still, it’s making insurance impossible and driving up costs for everybody else. Insurance companies are investing in addressing the problem, but they have ongoing costs. You can see the problem, really.

What we had before no longer works. We have built on natural floodplains and not added new ones. We have not adjusted rivers and canals. We haven’t learned from the Dutch, who have implemented various measures to stop flooding by learning from nature. Even that isn’t enough; we should be trying to slow or reduce the cause. That sadly means lifestyle changes when people are already struggling. A tough ask.

We should be building water reservoirs, floodplains, and catchment basins, and giving some of the land back to the water. Dredging waterways often only adds to the problem. You need more capacity for the water to flow somewhere. Dredging existing water networks is a minor fix, not a real one. Without a new approach, we have land that stays wet for months, making farming nearly impossible. We have, by accident, built floodplains and not told the people living on them.

I do think we need to be honest. It is easier to let a few deal with it for now, but a whole package is required. That means telling some rather difficult truths with ugly options on the table. We have to talk about managed retreat and admitting some areas simply cannot be saved. We have to talk about sacrificing certain farmland to save towns, and forcing a change in where and how we build. There are plenty of other things people want doing, hence somebody else can pay for it, and right now we do that with higher insurance costs.

It is going to be a massive engineering challenge and will reshape the environment. This is a problem that needs to be resolved everywhere, but here it is a major issue. Coastal areas need serious help, too. Otherwise, we need to confront the reality: certain things are unlivable due to human choices. It is going to be politically painful telling people that things they have done for hundreds of years are no longer viable. Farmers, for example, are going to be deeply annoyed. Worse still, giving them the ugly options.

What that means in practice is people moving and rebuilding millions of homes. Given how we have a housing crisis, with a shifting climate we need to rebuild the housing stock anyway. I view that as an opportunity, really. To reduce household bills and make sure people don’t get flooded.

The choice is clear, really. Govern well and deal with this problem, or don’t. I don’t think it is as simple as clearing the rivers yearly. Something bigger is required. The real risk is that we do nothing, the problem grows, and the political cost for not doing the job grows. Nobody has the guts to do anything about it or the cash, really. It is not a priority. You could argue we have mismanaged it and wasted funds. But dealing with flood waters yearly and the huge cost that brings, I think that is more of a mismanagement, really. I think that is a fair thing to say.

But telling people to their face you won’t help them or fix the problem? Well, good luck telling voters and the population that while you continue to build on risky land by choice. Even better luck trying to justify that when the political winds flow against you.

If you want a good example of why politics matters, here it is. And if you want a good example of why nothing changes, here it is. The incentive to do nothing is massive when you have wasted all your political capital on something else. Choices like these are hard, and there is no right or easy option, really. Hence why normal people get lost in the weeds, well, in this case, the floodwaters.

The question to anybody reading this would be simple: what would you do? I appreciate you may not know all the options but in your heart or gut, what would you do? Save a few or save the village? Or would you ignore the problem to focus on something else that matters to you? Would you be able to make the tough choices? Even if none of the options was something you liked? I know these are tough questions to answer.