FCERM Blog for FFIR

pic10 By Dr. Chris Skinner (University of Hull)
16th June 2015Images from Dr Lila Collet of Heriot-Watt university

On the 27th May I headed up to Edinburgh for the FCERM.net Annual Assembly. FCERM.net is the Flood and Coastal Erosion Management Network, set up from Heriot-Watt University with the aim to bring together researcher and practitioners, each with an interest in FCERM. The meeting opened on the evening of the 27th with a conference dinner at The Hub on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. This was finished off with a post-dinner address by Prof Roger Falconer, who inspired us to consider the importance of water and our own personal water footprint.

Dr Christel Prudhomme gave the first keynote, on ‘Climate Change Impact Assessment and Flood Resilience’ – she stressed that the key to effective communication on climate change issues start with agreeing a common language, communicating uncertainty and allowing for risk based decisions. The second keynote came from Professor Jim Hall on ‘Flood Risk Analysis and Investment Planning’. He explained the main risk areas around water – flooding, drought, harmful environmental impacts and inadequate supply or sanitation – and proposed a portfolio based approach of information, institutions and infrastructure to address these.

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The next part of the meeting was dissemination of results from past ‘sandpit’ projects – Blue-Green Cities, SESAME and Flood Memory. The Flood Memory project investigated the impacts of multiple flood events, as the flood risk of a catchment changes over time and most significantly after a flood event. This was particular relevant to my research, as its one of the main drivers behind our part of NERC FFIR. The rest of the meeting was devoted to looking at how researchers and practitioners can work together to deliver better FCERM – for us this is how we can convert the findings of our research into practise.

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Concurrent with the meeting was the poster session. The theme of the meeting this year was ‘Dissemination’, and I was presenting my work with SeriousGeoGames (SGG), demonstrating Humber in a Box via Google Cardboard headsets. This generating a lot of interest (so much so I nearly missed out on lunch), and it won one of the poster prizes at the meeting – I got to talk to more people about the science behind the model as they wanted to see what the headsets were about. I’m hoping to apply some of this work to the FFIR project in the future.

 

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Thanks to Dr Lila Collet of Heriot-Watt University for the images used in this blog.

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