Reflections on the floods

The Green Party Leader reflects on the damage she witnessed from the winter floods and the potential solutions she heard about at Conference

Natalie Bennett

There can be no doubt now, if there was any before, that Britain in a world warmed one degree above pre-industrial levels is going to see more intense, extreme rainfall, more often.

That's what many communities, particularly in the North of England, but also in Wales and Scotland, experienced over Christmas. As Green Party Leader, I made, sadly, many visits to communities affected by these floods, where I witnessed pressing individual issues that were different in each case.

In Lancaster, there was shock about the massive disruption that ensued when a flood took out an electricity sub-station, leaving the city without power. Cash machines, fuel pumps, sliding doors on student halls all stopped working - and hotels where flood victims might normally have been accommodated couldn't be used, since electronic keycards were needed.

In Kendal, concerns included extensive areas of impermeable urban construction, and anti-flood works that seemed only to have moved water from previously flooded areas to ones once considered 'safe'.

For Hebden Bridge, the management of grouse moors above the town, which is not only causing immense ecological damage but also reducing the land's ability to absorb water, was at the forefront of locals' minds. (The Green Party is calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting, which relies on destructive land management to produce grouse numbers 100 times above natural levels.)

But an issue that recurs across the country is the continued building on floodplains. When I visited Otley, standing beside recently flooded homes, locals pointed to a major new construction site just downstream, and worried about its potential impact next time.

I got a new perspective on this issue at Green Party Conference, when I chaired a panel on flooding that featured Dr Tom Barker from the Centre for Alternative Technology.

He explained that flood plains aren't 'beside' the river, they belong to the river. They are created by regular flows (often in winter) after heavy rain, and the terms 'one in 100 year flood' and 'one in 1,000 year flood' are effectively meaningless. If it's a floodplain, at some point it will flood, the river taking back what it created.

Understanding that, the fact that Britain is still building nearly 10,000 homes per year on floodplains is particularly disturbing.

There was, however, a lot of positive news on the panel of work being done on natural flood management and total catchment management.

Our own Councillor Sarah Lunnon, the lone Green on Gloucestershire County Council, showed the work she's been championing, so we learnt about using 'leaky dams' and large woody debris (LWD in the jargon) to slow the flow of water in fast-reactive catchments near Stroud.

Dr Paul Quinn, from the University of Newcastle, stressed the possibilities of storing large quantities of water on farmland with relatively low-impact, low- cost structures, pointing to work done to defend Lustrum Beck.

It's also clear that total catchment management requires a great deal more than just defensive measures. Land use and management are critical. Dr Barker noted that rain landed on trees in leaf can be absorbed 80 times better than on close-cropped pastures. Restoring and maintaining hedgerows, managing soils for higher carbon content (also, of course, good for storage for climate change reasons), remiring (restoring ponds and soaks) and preventing soil compaction all have a role to play.

On the panel, Fernanda Balata, from the New Economics Foundation's Blue New Deal project, was focusing on efforts to prevent and mitigate coastal flooding, but she had a critically important broader point to make: that surviving and thriving in our one-degree warmed world also means thinking about the broader needs of flood-threatened communities, for jobs, for economic opportunities, for hope for a genuinely sustainable future, things that are in particularly short supply in many economically-straightened coastal communities around Britain.

What's clear is that the narrow debate that dominated after the winter storms - about simply building more and higher flood defences - failed to get to grips with the broader issues we need to address.