Katharine Quarmby

Investigating flooding across Europe – our findings: why governments need to get serious about the harms of flooding

Last year our European journalism team was supported by public interest funder IJ4EU to shape an investigation called After The Floods, to look at flood preparedness, resilience and aftermath in various European nations (England, Scotland, Poland, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, N. Ireland and Denmark).

Flooding is our biggest natural disaster in the UK, and that is mirrored across Europe. It costs lives, properties and the environment – but it seems to be a blindspot for many who are not directly affected. How are we doing to live up to the challenge of increased flooding as climate change upends forecasts and changes the very landscapes in which we live?

In the UK I have been lucky enough to work with supportive news organisations including Prospect Magazine, The ENDS Report and The Ferret/the National in Scotland. The visualisation above is courtesy of ENDS Report, and gives some sense of the ongoing and growing challenge in the UK.

In a series of articles in the UK, I looked at the situation for people losing their homes on the North Norfolk coast, an area I have seen change within my own lifetime growing up in East Anglia; I looked at different sorts of flooding in the Greater Manchester area will get worse with climate change; I dug into the concept of flood poverty and I looked at Labour’s housebuilding plans, where many of the houses built will be in flood risk areas.

For the environmental news website and newsletter, ENDS Report, I did a deeper dive into the risks the UK currently faces, as flooding is the UK’s most frequent natural disaster, affecting people, properties and businesses. Is it the Labour party’s blindspot, as it ‘build, baby, builds’? You can read on the link above, or listen on the podcast link here.

For Prospect Magazine, I travelled around England and Scotland looking at the different threats regions face which are grappling with flood risks, from rain, to surface water, to rivers, groundwater and coastal.

You can read about the problems in Scotland, in The Ferret here (co-published with The National newspaper). But there is also hope, as communities rally and organise to protect themselves against flooding, as I wrote about here.

Further afield, you can read all the journalism across the European countries we covered as it comes in, on the Investigative Reporting Demark website (our co-ordinators for the project).