Wildfires in the British Isles: It’s time to get ready

Posted on by Communities Prepared Team

The horrifying media images of the devastation that wildfires have caused in recent years have been clear for all to see – from the shocking loss of homes in California to burning wild life in Australia. Devastating deaths, large-scale evacuations, destruction of towns, widespread pollution and biodiversity loss. Impacts are being realised across all over the world.

A wildfire is an uncontrolled fire that burns in the wildland vegetation, often in rural areas though increasingly at rural-urban interfaces. Wildfires can burn in forests, grasslands, savannas, and other ecosystems. They are not limited to a particular continent or environment, indeed there have been “zombie fires” in the Arctic burning under tundra. Wildfires are a natural part of various ecosystems playing a significant and complex role in that can both positively and negatively shape landscapes, soil, biodiversity and influence other processes. It results from three factors coming together – fuel, ignition and weather conditions. Yet, various factors including changes to land use alongside rapidly changing climate conditions is creating more flammable landscapes in some areas, less in others changing global fire regimes.

Wildfires are becoming more extreme with some regions. Canada saw forests ravaged and the evacuation of 230,000 people. The Amazon experienced the worst air quality on record, whilst around the world there were fatalities caused by wildfires. Satellite data analysis reports around 4 million km2 land mass vegetation is burned globally every year equating to the size of India and Pakistan combined. Globally, fires contribute to around 8billion tonnes of C02 annually as well as reducing the quantity of carbon storage by around 10% thereby significantly contributing to weather events and climate interactions.

However, it is not as well known that wildfire events are increasing here in the British Isles, with growing risks that could directly affect communities in the near future. Wildfire is escalating in previously low risk regions such as the UK, necessitating the need for thorough and rapid resource deployment to prevent devasting damages. 2025 saw the UK experience its worst wildfire season on record. Around 66,000 football pitches worth of land were burnt losing precious nature and emitting ghg’s. Climate change is contributing to more frequent and more severe fire events. Burns were seen through large areas of upland heath, peatlands and forests affecting some of the UK’s most biodiverse habitats. In addition to nature losses, wildfires are directly impacting communities too. Properties have been lost in the last 5 years, 50 evacuations occurred in 2025 as well as injuries, major risks to a variety of sectors is on the rise. Smoke impacts to communities are also a concern with the 2018 Saddleworth wildfires estimated to cost the NHS modelled at 21.1million and 165% increase of excess mortalities during PM2.5 excess exposure.

Fire services in England and Wales responded to 564 wildfires from January to June 2025, an increase from 69 fires in the same period from 2024. The escalating threat of wildfires last summer and in particular the increased risk of wildfires on the rural-urban interface, where homes border the countryside is drawing cause for concern. Recent studies that suggest 1.8 million homes are at this higher risk rural-urban interface.

On a more positive note, there is great and urgent opportunity for wildfire management to support local resilience. Enabling landscapes to become more fire resilient, enhancing community-based preparedness and early warning systems can help empower individuals and communities to both reduce risks and cope with future wildfires. Moreover, effective wildfire management can contribute to sustainable land-use practices, mitigating long-term vulnerabilities through promoting ecosystem health.

Prioritising prevention and preparedness can enhance resilience to future wildfire risks. Compared to other nations, ignitions in the UK are overwhelmingly related to human activities either through arson, accidents or other activities. For this reason, the public can play a vital role in preventing wildfires. So what can be done? The good news is that small, local actions can help.

For community leaders – including wildfire education and risk assessment in local emergency and resilience planning will become increasingly important. Working with landowners and park managers to reduce fuel loads safely. Considering seasonal campaigns and signs about safe behaviours in dry and heat spells. Support clear communication plans for fire alerts and evacuations run through local fire and rescue services. Educating about the need to avoid barbecues, bonfires and disposable BBQs in local areas during heatwaves when out enjoying the countryside and nature and identifying vulnerable houses and people to authorities. For households – clearing excess dry leaves and debris from gardens, roofs and gutters and storing flammable materials safely can make a difference. Of course if you see signs of fire, call 999 immediately without hesitation

Wildfires are becoming a community resilience challenge and one we can help reduce the risk of, if we act now.

About the Author:

Sophy Greenhalgh is a doctoral researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfire, Environment & Society assessing UK resilience to rising wildfire risks. Sophy’s 20+ years expertise spans international climate policy, nature-based solutions and disaster management. She has delivered high impact climate initiatives for governments, business and multilateral organisations such as the European Commission and UN and is serving as an expert advisor to The Earthshot Prize.

References

1. Belcher, C., Brown, I., Clay, G., Doerr, S., Elliott, A., Gazzard, R., Kettridge, N., Morison, J., Perry, M., Santín, C. & Smith, T. (2021) UK wildfires and their climate challenges: expert-led report prepared for the third Climate Change Risk Assessment. Available at: https://www.ukclimaterisk.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/UK-Wildfires-and-their-Climate-Challenges.pdf

2. Carbon Brief – Wildfires 2025 https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-record-uk-wildfires-have-burned-an-area-twice-the-size-of-glasgow-in-2025/

3. Hanlon, H.M., Bernie, D., Carigi, G. et al. (2021) ‘Future changes to high-impact weather in the UK’, Climatic Change, 166, p. 50. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03100-5

4. Headwater Economics (n.d.) Headwater Economics. Available at: https://headwaterseconomics.org

5. Jones, M.W., Abatzoglou, J.T., Veraverbeke, S., Andela, N., Lasslop, G. & Forkel, M. (2022) ‘Global and regional trends and drivers of fire under climate change’, Reviews of Geophysics, 60(3), p. e2020RG000726.

6. Kandasamy, G., Kandasamy, S. & Narayanan, M. (2024) ‘Influences of wildfire on the forest ecosystem and climate change: A comprehensive study’, Environmental Research, 240(2), p. 117537.

7. Perry, M.C., Vanvyve, E., Betts, R.A. & Palin, E.J. (2022) ‘Past and future trends in fire weather for the UK’, Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 22, pp. 559–575. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-22-559-2022

8. Richardson, D., Black, A.S. & Irving, D. et al. (2022) ‘Global increase in wildfire potential from compound fire weather and drought’, npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, 5, p. 23.

9. Sayedi, S.S., Abbott, B.W. & Vannière, B. et al. (2024) ‘Assessing changes in global fire regimes’, Fire Ecology, 20, p. 18.

10. Sheikh Mansoor, I., Farooq, I. & Kachroo, M.M. et al. (2022) ‘Elevation in wildfire frequencies with respect to climate change’, Journal of Environmental Management, 301, p. 113769. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.113769

11. Smith, A.J.P., Jones, M.W., Abatzoglou, J.T., Canadell, J.G. & Betts, R.A. (2020) Climate change increases the risk of wildfires: September 2020. ScienceBrief. Available at: https://sciencebrief.org/uploads/reviews/ScienceBrief_Review_WILDFIRES_Sep2020.pdf

12. The Global Wildfire Information System (2023) The Global Wildfire Information System.

13. UK National Emergency Trust (n.d.) UK National Emergency Trust.

14. United Nations Environment Programme (2022) Spreading like wildfire – The rising threat of extraordinary landscape fires: A UNEP Rapid Response Assessment. Nairobi: UNEP.

15. United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) (n.d.) United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.

16. World Health Organization (WHO) (n.d.) Wildfires: https://www.who.int/health-topics/wildfires/#tab=tab_1

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Guest Blog: How the podcast “Screw This, Let’s try something else” is sharing stories of what’s possible

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My name is Matt Golding – and I’m a filmmaker and more recently a podcaster. 

In my latest project, “Screw This, Let’s try something else”, I and friend / fellow storyteller Maryam Pasha tour the UK visiting just some of the hundreds of ordinary communities that are doing something extraordinary – and demonstrating that new, more affordable, equitable and sustainable ways to live well are possible. 

This is part of a wider project I’m running called ANTIDOTE, which is based on the idea that the stories we need right now are not deeper explorations of the many problems we face, but examples of people like us, getting together and showing what we can do about them. 

The kind of stories we tell include:

  • 1: Ambition Lawrence Weston: 
    • A community in Bristol who became so fed up of being left behind by government they decided to do something about it – knocked on 3,500 doors and asked 3 simple questions:
      • What’s good about living in Lawrence Weston?
      • What’s not so good?
      • What would you like to change?

– They discovered the major frustration was that they were living in a food desert – so they did something ingenious (listen to the podcast for more) and managed to get a supermarket to move to the area, bringing food prices down and proving they could turn ideas into reality. 

They then went on to re-write their local housing policy, making it illegal to build homes with gas boilers, without electric car charging points, and without top notch insulation.

As if this wasn’t enough, they subsequently built the biggest wind turbine in England, which is 100% community owned and nets them £100k a year to keep change going in their community. 

  • 2: CIVIC SQUARE: 
    • A group in the urban heart of Birmingham, one of the most diverse neighbourhoods in the UK, have come together to design a neighbourhood fit for the actual future we face – tackling retrofit, food growing, energy production and community organising in incredibly smart and wise ways. 

Having hit hurdles along the way (listen to episode 4 of our podcast) they finally realised the value of land ownership in the power of their plans and after much perseverance took ownership of the freehold of an old industrial site in 2025, which will now be developed into a new neighbourhood hub – tackling many of the issues neighborhoods in the UK face and offering a blueprint for others. 

3: CARRICK GREENGROCERS:

  • Carrick Fergus in Northern Ireland, like most of the places in our series, was fed up with being neglected. A small team asked their fellow residents what they wanted to change, and in this case supermarkets were the problem (having decimated the high street and left people resentful of paying for what they saw as overpriced, bland and plastic wrapped food). 

They crowd funded a greengrocer which stocks local regeneratively grown food from a market garden 10 minutes from the shop, and they’re now advising on Northern Irish food policy to see how this type of model could expand to increase food resilience and reconnect people to local food and farming. 

All of these examples prove what’s possible when we reimagine the key things we all depend on, together. 

In episode 6, the final part of this first series, we’re joined by friend (and author of the book Citizens) Jon Alexander to draw out the key learnings of communities across the country – to help more of us join in. These include:

  • 1: Find the others: Start small – most community projects that achieve big change only start with 8 – 12 core people. Initially just start with 1 or 2 others who share your passion!
  • 2: ..but ask everyone: …and then they ask the whole community what they want (and the pattern here is strong – the more who’re asked, the easier it is to find what it is the community really wants, and therefore will support)
  • 3: Agree a vision and values: It’s easier to work together if you’ve all agreed clearly what you’re working towards, and how you are doing it
  • 4: And trust yourself: …trust your collective instincts. Our systems are so broken, there is no book that will tell you the way forward for where you are. But how change needs to work in your local area is probably something you can work out best together. 

Take a listen – and I hope it inspires you. 

If so – we’ve created a postcode search tool to help you find 5 examples of collective action within 5 miles of your house. Check it out here: https://www.antidotelive.studio/near-you 

Together we can create big meaningful change on the things we all need – food, energy, housing, democracy that actually works. These stories prove this isn’t only possible, it’s already happening all around us.

To find out more visit us here:

Podcast: SCREW THIS, LET’S TRY SOMETHING ELSE:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/screw-this-lets-try-something-else/id1863391095

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Bornsbddwi4xZYQLoAm6b?si=d500b7fbf3924eb6

ANTIDOTE project website: https://www.antidotelive.studio/

ANTIDOTE Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/antidotelive/

ANTIDOTE TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@antidote_live

ANTIDOTE Substack: https://mattgolding.substack.com/

Do you have a guest blog you’d like to share on Communities Prepared? Be sure to reach out to us at communitiesprepared@groundwork.org.uk, or send us a message here.

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Guest Blog: Sensing Climate: Disability & Climate Resilience 

Posted on by Communities Prepared Team

In this month’s guest blog, Dr Sarah Bell shines the light on an essential topic, the interface of climate resilience and disability. Dr Bell is a senior lecturer in Health Geography at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health (ECEHH). Since 2019, Dr Bell has been co-designing an interdisciplinary research programme to explore opportunities to highlight disability rights and knowledge in climate adaptation scholarship, academia and practice.

Climate change poses significant risks to human life and livelihoods in ways that are compounding and creating new forms of social inequality. Disabled people – including 16% of the global population and 24% of the UK population – are particularly at risk of adverse climate impacts. Globally, disabled people are 2-4 times more likely to die or be injured in heatwaves, hurricanes and floods.  

In part, these risks are due to the damaging impacts of extreme weather events on existing health conditions. In part, they are due to the cumulative influence of austerity and declining welfare support, which have undermined people’s capacity to cope in the current climate, let alone prepare for future risks. But these risks are exacerbated further by eco-ableism; whereby some of the actions promoted to address the climate emergency are creating new challenges for disabled people.  

When not framed out of discussions about climate change, disabled people are often framed solely as one of several ‘climate vulnerable’ groups, with little reflection on the social, political and economic systems that create vulnerability. This is not to say that vulnerability does not exist. It does. But vulnerability is created by our society, and it doesn’t have to be that way.  

The single story of vulnerability also overlooks the rich knowledge and skills of disabled people within climate action. Climate change is disabling; it is making our world more uncertain, more unpredictable, more harmful. Yet the people who know what it means to navigate a disabling world – disabled people – are so often left out of this work. 

Without denying the existence of vulnerability, this single story of ‘disability as vulnerability’ flattens a rich diversity of lived experience and closes down collaborative opportunities to imagine climate-resilient and socially-just worlds.  

Sensing Climate is a five-year research project, led by the University of Exeter, and funded by UK Research and Innovation and the Leverhulme Trust. It foregrounds the role and importance of disability knowledges in developing adaptive responses to increasingly unpredictable and challenging environments.  

It is a collaborative programme of interdisciplinary research, encompassing international, UK national law and policy reviews and in-depth city case studies in Bristol and Glasgow (UK) and Dublin (Ireland). It includes qualitative and arts-based research activities across the three case study cities as well as policy roundtables at city and national levels.  

A recurrent issue being shared by disabled participants across the study is a concern about gaps in emergency preparedness and resilience planning with and for disabled people. Advice for how to prepare for extreme weather events often places responsibility on individuals to do so, or suggests that neighbours will be on hand to provide support in an emergency. Yet, as discussed by our participants, many disabled people cannot afford to create a grab bag or gather emergency supplies, and do not have a neighbour they could turn to for help in an emergency, nor a personal assistant or caregiver who would be on hand at home to help. Many had a sense that no-one would even know they were there, let alone how to support them safely in the event of a storm or flood.  

As commented by one participant:  

“To deal with the complexity and difficulty of human life we need to serve those who need it most first… You need to think about people who are on machines to keep them alive all the time which means you have to be prepared for that which means you have to know how many people, roughly where they are, how quickly you can get all the support in place and you need to test it regularly to make sure it’s all actually there. Like, you don’t send a fire engine out not having tested it and giving it an MOT and all that kind of thing, do you?”  

Underlying many of the concerns raised, has been a sense that the lives of disabled people are not seen as important. For example, one participant explained: 

“There’s something about how people view disabled people’s lives, and their value and their worth. And how in “natural disasters”, or in floods, or in heatwaves… and cold snaps over winter … it’s normally disabled and elderly people that will die in those situations. And people are like ‘oh, well you know, that was going to happen anyway, they’re disabled, and they’re old’. I feel like there’s that kind of attitude generally in society, of if a disabled person or if an elderly person dies it doesn’t really matter as much as if a younger person or a non-disabled person died… it feels like in terms of the climate emergency it’s just another thing where disabled people are not considered as valuable, full human beings”  

Within the project, we have been working closely with Dr Emma Geen (Climate and Disability Programme Associate to the Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership’s Community Climate Action (CCA) project) to develop a series of guidance notes, including for example: 

  • Our recently launched ‘Crip Up Climate Conversations’ guidance series, which aims to broaden the ways in which disabled people are framed within (or framed out of) climate action, and to support people in creating respectful, safe and inclusive opportunities for disabled communities to shape this work. 
  • Resources for local authorities and third sector organisations working on different dimensions of climate action to understand disability priorities in the areas of emergency preparedness, transport, housing, energy, green jobs, nature, food and waste, along with two cross-cutting resources around co-production and inclusive engagement. These will be launched in Spring 2026.   

If you would like to find out more about the project, the resources or the specific work around emergency preparedness and community resilience, do get in touch with the project lead, Sarah Bell (sarah.bell@exeter.ac.uk).  

Dr Sarah Bell

About the Author
Dr Sarah Bell is a Senior Lecturer in Health Geography at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health (ECEHH), part of Exeter University. Her research interests include geographies of health and wellbeing, disability-inclusive climate action and more-than-human  therapeutic landscape experiences.

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Guest Blog: Met Office Training for Community Responders and Volunteers 

Posted on by Communities Prepared Team

Firstly, let me introduce myself. My name is Mark Rogers, and I am the Met Office Civil Contingencies Advisor for London and Southeast England. My role within the Met Office is to work alongside emergency responder partners, providing them with any weather-related information that they may need, especially during a period of severe weather. I also run the Advisor team’s online training offering, both for emergency and community responders.   

If you have been linking in with Communities Prepared for some time, you will be aware that they offer a wide variety of excellent training courses to prepare you and your communities for emergencies that may impact you. 

What may be less known is that the UK Met Office also provide training courses for Community responders and the Voluntary Sector and have just launched their July to December 2025 prospectus.  

The Met Office is the UK’s National Met Service, and one of their core aims is to help people to make decisions to stay safe and thrive. Understanding the weather and climate, and knowing where you can find important information, enables people to be #WeatherReady. 

Group 1, Grouped object

In the new prospectus, the Met Office Civil Contingency Advisors are running three courses which provide you with information which can help you be prepared for what may lie ahead, both for short-term weather and our long-term climate.   

The climate change course looks at the science around climate change, what changes and impacts we are already facing, what the latest projections are showing, and finally some of the important mitigation and adaptation ideas that need to be considered to try to reduce the potential impacts. This course also includes information on the Local Authority Climate Service which is an excellent new site from the Met Office where you can find out more information about the changes you are likely to see in your local area. 

In the shorter term, the winter weather hazards course does what it says on the tin and looks at the different types of winter weather, explaining how they develop and their potential impacts. 

The last of the three courses is the Met Office Information, Products and Services course which looks at the information provided by the Met Office to help people prepare for severe weather ahead of its arrival.  This includes the National Severe Weather Warning Service, flooding information and the Met Office App and website.  

The training runs on selected dates throughout the year. For further information please email training.cca@metoffice.gov.uk.  

Did you know the Met Office website has a Community Resilience Hub? This provides essential information for you and your community to stay safe, prepared and proactive during times of severe weather? Download the Community Resilience leaflet (pdf) to share with your local community.  

Thank you very much to Mark for contributing this blog to Communities Prepared. Be sure to get in contact regarding training, and keep up with The Met Office on their X, Linkedin, Instagram and Tiktok.

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Exploring Society’s Pursuit for Climate Resilience

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JBA Consulting’s Phil Emonson’s reflects on last month’s Flood and Coast workshop collaboration with Communities Prepared and on wider societal resilience to climate change.

The Flood and Coast Conference took place on 6th-8th June 2023 in Telford.

With ‘whole of society’ resilience now a national government ambition, and reflecting on JBA’s own vision to ‘lead in society’s pursuit for resilience to climate change’, it was with huge pleasure that I delivered a workshop on societal resilience with colleagues from Communities Prepared at the recent CIWEM Flood & Coast conference.  Delegates were given the opportunity to explore what societal resilience to climate change is and how those of us who work in flood, water and environmental management can contribute to it. 

Risk Management Authorities have the opportunity to help raise awareness of local risks amongst the community, support adaptation strategies, help improve planning, training and exercising at a local level to improve response capabilities, and support effective and appropriate incident recovery.  To do this there a number of questions that need considering when embarking on flood, water and environmental management schemes, such as:

  • What are the demographics of the community in question, and what is the most effective engagement strategy for them?
  • What FCRM activities can communities be involved in?
  • What are the challenges and benefits arising?
  • How can resilience to climate change be made sustainable, and what should ‘active’ resilience look like?

The Flood & Coast workshop reconfirmed that every community is different, and so we can’t rely on a ‘one size fits all’ approach.  To effectively build societal resilience to climate change a greater portfolio of tools and resources needs to be available locally to engage different demographic groups. 

JBA Consulting and Communities Prepared have combined expertise in emergency management, community resilience and wider community development.  We have recently launched a joint offer specifically for local authorities in establishing and sustaining climate change resilience in local communities.  Such support is tailored, and is of particular relevance to projects in Defra’s Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation Programme (FCRIP).  We aim to ensure local communities develop resilience to climate change and for the approach to be effective and adaptive to change whilst connecting individuals and groups.  Services and support include:

  • Supporting the community in sharing concerns and understanding responsibilities
  • Considering ways to engage deeply with the community
  • Mapping the risks and opportunities which exist locally
  • Identifying risks and providing training in these emergencies
  • Embedding non-technical skills in emergency planning, response and recovery
  • Emergency response tabletop exercises and debriefing
  • Community emergency plan co-development and review
  • Communication and education campaigns

In December 2022, the UK government published the National Resilience Framework, officially making resilience a national endeavour. Emergencies in recent years such as the Covid-19 pandemic, flooding and drought, have put the spotlight on how the UK prepares and responds to threats.  The Framework articulates the plans to strengthen the systems and capabilities that underpin the UK’s resilience to all civil contingency risks, with a priority to give greater transparency on the risks we face and protecting the most vulnerable in our communities. 

There are three core principles to the Framework:

1. a developed and shared understanding of the risks we face,

2. a greater emphasis on preparation and prevention, and

3. ensuring resilience is a ‘whole of society’ endeavour. 

In the case of our changing climate, there is little that can be done to prevent the risks (such as coastal erosion, sea level rise, flooding, and warmer summers leading to more drought) and so a focus on adaptation is appropriate. At JBA, our resilience framework seeks therefore to promote adaptation. 

JBA Consulting is part of the JBA family of environmental, engineering and risk management companies. They work collaboratively across disciplines combining analytical, engineering, social and nature-inspired solutions, supporting their clients to adapt and build resilience to climate change both in the UK and worldwide. Read more about their work on their website.

If you would like more information on this workshop and its contents please contact either Phil Emonson of JBA Consulting or Communities Prepared Programme Manager Hannah Baker.

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The flood-drought continuum and why it is important to prepare across water risks

Posted on by Communities Prepared Team

DRY Project lead Professor Lindsey McEwen explains the flood-drought continuum and its value when considering community resilience in a guest blog.

Two images from the DRY picture book (Luci Gorell Barnes, 2019, digital collage)

What is the flood-drought continuum?

Floods and droughts sit at either end of a hydrological continuum and both risks affect the UK.  Flooding is complex and often compound, combining the different types of river flooding, surface runoff, tides/surges on coasts and groundwater, in the UK this can also include flash flooding in rapid response catchments and surface water flooding affecting urban areas. Drought can be defined in different ways: meteorological drought when there are extended periods without rainfall; agricultural (or soil moisture) drought with effects on, for example, grassland and crop growth; hydrological drought when rivers or other waterbodies become low; and finally full-blown water supply drought.

Both floods and droughts are set to increase under climate change scenarios in the UK (IPCC, 2022). It is possible to have floods during periods of underlying drought and drought conditions persisting after flooding. Indeed, dry periods leading to hard compacted soils can increase flood problems, with water running off quickly into water courses. Storm water flushing pollutants – heavy metals and bacteria – off roads and pavements after long periods of dryness can cause pollution in rivers impacting use by people, pets and nature. 

Despite this, statutory responsibilities for managing flood and drought risk tend to sit within different departments or organisations.

What are its implications for community engagement?

It is increasingly important to engage communities about both floods and droughts, but this brings challenges for several reasons.

These extreme weather risks are experienced by communities in very different ways. Floods are visible and emotive risks while droughts tend to be hidden and diffuse – at least in their early stages. Floods tend to be more strongly on people’s radar, while emerging droughts may only be noticed by certain members of the community. Those who grow crops, such as gardeners, allotment holders and farmers, are likely to notice lack of rainfall and dry soils, while those who engage with rivers for sport and recreation, such as fishermen and canoeists, are more likely to notice low water levels. Many others will not be aware of drought until the water supply is interrupted. In addition, the public can associate drought positively with heat and warm sunny days when in fact it can continue over dry winters as well. As an additional challenge, every drought is different.

The DRY Z-cards – ‘Water, drought and you’

In addition, the idea that floods and droughts might occur at the same time is hard for people to engage with. This is partly because of the myth of infinite water and green land in the UK. It is also because water deficits take a long time to recover; one fall of heavy rainfall does not end a drought. It is also important to match communications about risk to the weather conditions at the time.  Communicating about drought when it is raining tends not to work.

How does thinking about water risks together help communities preparing for climate resilience?

There are valuable opportunities to think about water risk more holistically. A community that is resilient to one risk is already likely to be more resilient to another, so it is more effective to build broader resilience within communities beyond a resilience to flooding.  Below are examples of how existing approaches to managing risk can be combined or joined-up.  

Some people are the ‘eyes and ears’ on the ground for weather and its impacts in communities – such as weather wardens or citizen scientists recording rainfall or monitoring the river. These can have valuable local knowledge of relative dryness and wetness and change in their locale. 

The same community networks that share information and skills about ‘how to prepare’ for one type of extreme weather risk can be used for another, for example, floods, drought (or heat, snow etc). These networks can support community training to prepare, respond and adapt to other extreme weather risks and hazards.  

Local networks also include volunteers providing mutual aid locally to support more vulnerable groups in communities. There are overlaps in groups likely to be socially vulnerable and exposed to floods and droughts by age, gender, income and disability.

Some of the specific measures used in adapting to floods can also help prepare for droughts and wider climate resilience. For example, installation of water butts in households helps to store water locally. In some settings like Hull, this distributed way of collecting water is being trialled as a flood mitigation method that also stores water for watering gardens in dry periods.

Similarly, on a broader neighbourhood scale, Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) within communities help slow the flow to local water courses and deal with rainfall as close to its source as possible. Involving the public in the care and maintenance of SuDS schemes is important (see CIRIA animation – ‘Ever wonder where the rain goes?’). 

‘Thinking about water risks together’ involves “thinking about water as a valuable resource” which can feel hard when there is too much water in the wrong place at the wrong time during flooding.  In building climate resilience, we all need to think about how we value, and live with and without water. This will need communities prepared to recognise that water is at the same time “fragile, precious and dangerous” (United Nations Panel on Water).

Further Resources

The DRY Utility website has resources to support learning about UK drought – for schools and communities like Z cards and a primary school book.  It also provides information on ‘Communicating drought’.

About the author

Lindsey McEwen is Professor of Environmental Management and Director of the Centre for Water, Communities and Resilience at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.  Her research focuses on water risk management, working in community settings.  She was lead on the 5-year Natural Environment Research Council funded DRY (Drought Risk and You) project.

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Engaging in the planning system can help build communities that are safer from the risks of flooding

Posted on by Communities Prepared Team
This guest blog has been written by Celia Davis, Projects & Policy Manager at the Town and Country Planning Association and Heather Shepherd, Community and Recovery Support, National Flood Forum.

The experience and risk of flooding is already a difficult reality for many people in England, and will become more common in future as a result of climate change. After experiencing flooding, people often become more conscious of their local environment, and sensitive to changes that might increase the risk of flooding. New development is one of those changes that communities may become more aware of.planning system plays a major role in directing where new development will go and how it will be built, and these decisions are crucial to reducing the risk of flooding, both now and in the future.

The planning system should act as a vital safeguard against the risk of flooding by making sure that development is not inappropriately located, or badly designed, so that existing and new communities are not exposed to the risk of flooding.

However, with local authorities under significant pressure to find land for housing, and local authority planning services in a crisis of under-resourcing, new development that is located in flood risk areas, or does not go far enough to reduce the risk of flooding, is still happening. To add to this, the impacts of climate change, which will significantly increase flood risk in the UK, are often underplayed, misunderstood, or ignored. It is frustrating and demoralising to see decisions being taken that do not help to solve these problems – and, in some cases, actively make them worse.

Local communities have unique knowledge of the flood risk in their area, as well as the drive to tackle climate change and create a positive future for the next generation. It is therefore vital for people to get involved in local decisions.

Many people feel locked out of key decisions because the planning system is complex, hard to navigate, and the technical language is off putting. But communities can shape a better future for their area in a number of ways: by sharing expertise, working together on a shared plan for their local area, and by making sure decision makers are properly considering future flood risk when they look at the location and design of new places.

The TCPA are working with the National Flood Forum to help people navigate the planning system, so they feel more confident and empowered to have a voice in the decisions that might affect them.

Our short briefing notes provide a great resource for people who do not have experience of the planning system but are worried about the flood risk where they live.

We are also holding two workshops (in Birmingham and London) to give an overview of the planning system and greater understanding of its role in addressing flood risk, and how communities can influence development in their area.

We want to make sure that people are not put off by the details of the planning system, and feel confident to have their say and make their neighbourhoods better and safer places to live.

The TCPA and National Flood Forum are grateful to Flood Re for their generous support of this work.

Link to workshops:

Our workshops will be held on:

  • 30th November, 6.30-8.30pm, The Priory Rooms, Birmingham, B4 6AF. Register here.
  • 5th December, 5-7pm, TPCA Offices, 17 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AS. Register here.

Link to resources:

The TCPA and the National Flood Forum have produced a guide for communities on the planning system and flood risk which is available here:

https://tcpa.org.uk/resources/building-a-safer-future/

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Community resilience is vital for future heatwaves

Posted on by Communities Prepared Team

Why does community resilience matter in a heatwave? Nick Drew, senior project officer on Communities Prepared, explains.

“What a scorcher!”

The UK has just had its hottest day ever, breaking 40 degrees Celsius for the first time. And while some see this as an opportunity to flock to the beach, there is a more serious side. Heat is deadly – the 2003 heatwave in Europe led to more than 20,000 deaths – often of elderly people in housing that wasn’t built for the extreme heat, and often living alone. We don’t yet know what the impact of the recent heatwave will be, but it’s likely there will be a spike in the numbers of people who lose their lives in July.

With climate change starting to bite, we are seeing increasingly severe weather events – and the Met Office projections show that instances of these events will continue to increase. In February, we had three named storms within the period of a week (Dudley, Eunice and Franklin), leaving flooding, power outages, and travel chaos in their wake. And whilst there is much we can do as individuals to respond to extreme weather events, it is when we come together as communities that we can really support the more vulnerable members of society. Therefore it is vital that communities become more resilient before the crisis hits.

Communities Prepared is a Groundwork programme, primarily funded by The National Lottery Reaching Communities Fund, that aims to support communities to do just that – building their capacity to work effectively with the Emergency Services when there is a major incident, but also in the emergency situations where communities are fending for themselves. It aims to equip community members to run their own Community Emergency Volunteer groups, through training and support from Groundwork’s Communities Prepared team.

The programme is unique in its offer thanks to its national, multi-issue community training and support focus. However Groundwork is just one organisation that is active in this space – and we bring our long expertise in community work, as outlined in our new report From the Ground Up, into a wider circle of organisations looking to develop community responses to emergencies. With that in mind, Communities Prepared is working with the multi-sector Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership (VCSEP) and the British Red Cross.

A table-top Heatwave Exercise, run by the VCSEP in April, showed the range of partners potentially involved in such emergencies. The exercise highlighted some of the challenges around sharing an understanding of at-risk community members, and also about the information flows that need to be in place to deal with the set of cascading events that can fall out of an extreme weather scenario.

“This is what Communities Prepared is all about – we act as the ‘glue’ between community level discussions and the wider range of potential stakeholders.”

There is a huge challenge in engagement and awareness raising, as well as upskilling individuals and community groups. And in this context, the five key ingredients in From The Ground Up are all ones that we recognise within Communities Prepared:

  • Longevity: the project has been running since a regional pilot in 2016, built on learning from other Groundwork projects before it, and has built up a reputation and recognition among a wide set of stakeholders and networks over this time. Some of these are local, but many of them are regional or national. For communities, this means they know who they need to talk to for support – and we complement this with a diverse training offer which not only provides technical content but focuses on the longer-term sustainability of volunteer groups too.
  • Hubs: we recognise the value of a physical space to act as a rallying point for communities, facilitating networking and other community activities, and have been exploring ways to incorporate this into community resilience building.
  • Mediators and Capacity Builders: this is what Communities Prepared is all about – we act as the ‘glue’ between community level discussions and the wider range of potential stakeholders – and we help the community to understand how best to interact with those stakeholders.
  • Variety and detail: We see community resilience as being part of a ‘whole of society’ response to the challenges that we all face. That means that everyone should be able to play a part – either as a long-term volunteer, or for a one-off task in response to a call for immediate help within their community. The challenges faced by a community are quite varied and not always easy to predict – so being able to deal with the unexpected is a key part of upskilling communities. And it’s why our focus is multi-issue; we encourage community volunteers to think about how they can support their community in a range of different situations, built on an understanding of their priorities and needs – which in turn helps to keep them motivated and engaged too.
  • Building the communities workforce: within the Communities Prepared team, we all have extensive experience of community working (and some lived experience of dealing with emergencies) but come from quite different backgrounds. It is this blend of experience that enables us to support communities to feel empowered to manage with the variety of challenges they face, and to take the programme forward against an ever-changing backdrop of government policy, emerging risks, and wider initiatives in the resilience world.

We believe that community resilience also has to be built “from the ground up” – and with the set of interconnected challenges that communities across the UK face, now is the time for Groundwork to be strategically focusing on how Communities Prepared can scale to meet those challenges. We hope you will join us on that journey.

Blog by Nick Drew, Senior Project Officer, Communities Prepared

Read From the Ground Up

Find out more about Communities Prepared

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Stress awareness in incident management training

Posted on by Communities Prepared Team

Stress Awareness Month has been held every April since 1992, to raise awareness of the causes and cures for our modern stress epidemic. This years’ theme is Community, largely because of the increased rates of loneliness and isolation that have emerged as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In this blog, Evie Whatling from JBA Consulting explores their recent work with the Environment Agency’s Wessex Area Incident team, to incorporate stress management into incident management training and exercising.

A community is much more than just a group of people. It’s about having a sense of belonging and connection to others and feeling supported and accepted by them. This is as true for where we live as it is for where we work. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has made it more challenging to build or sustain these types of communities.

This community and loss of connection is something that is also extending to incident management arrangements. Virtual and hybrid incident management is likely to remain, and already we have identified that the risk of burnout has increased. There is a strong link that these burnout rates have increased because of loneliness and isolation, and burnout is a symptom of stress, and so an interconnected system emerges.

Stress is an inevitable component of incident management, there is no way of avoiding it – but being aware of the signs and adopting coping mechanisms can be very effective in managing stress. We have been working with the Environment Agency’s Wessex Area Incident Teams to work on addressing some of these emerging challenges, as part of our wider Incident Management Training and Exercising Framework.

How does stress management training work?

Stress management training needs to adapt and expand to ensure that we are not only helping to inform incident responders on what stress is and what can be done to help manage it. Stress management training now needs to include how we can try and adjust our virtual incident management operations to minimise these feelings of isolation and loneliness. This in turn extends to how we can mitigate burnout, and support stress from virtual environments. Stress management training can also explore what we can do to build a sense of community, internally and with partners agencies.

Our work with the Wessex Area Incident Teams is addressing some of these emerging challenges and providing tools to help incident responders.

Some key tools we focus on include:

  • Optimising how we communicate virtually. Establishing online etiquette to minimise information overload, and having responders consider specifically what output is wanted from information shared.
  • Prioritising breaks. It is easy in virtual arrangements to keep working through, forgetting that breaks now need to be planned for and can’t be ad hoc. Planning breaks and trying our hardest to stick to them is important to allow ourselves to decompress. Alongside this, breaks should be taken away from the ‘incident room’. Visually separating ourselves from where we are responding to the incident allows us to physiologically distance ourselves from the scene.
  • Team support. Have colleagues ready to stand in and enable breaks, as well as establish work rotations in place so we can switch between high stress activities to lower stress functions.
  • Establish buddy systems for mutual aid arrangements. This means establishing communication lines and teaming up someone from a different area with someone from the responding area to mitigate feelings of isolation and loneliness.
  • Stress bucket tool and adapting this to have people identify stressors they can remove; stressors they can’t remove but can control; and finally, any stressors that can’t be controlled or removed, and so learning how to accept these stressors in the incident.
  • Mindapple tool. The premise of the tool is to have ‘1 of your 5 a day’, but this has been adapted to allow responders to: mark 5 things they can do for their wellbeing before the incident (i.e., update calendar, keep commitments to a minimum, have food in the fridge); 5 things that can help during the incident (i.e., take a break, do a grounding exercise); and 5 things to focus on after the incident (i.e., go for a walk, debrief, have a balanced meal).

We have received positive feedback from our training that will hopefully prove valuable during future incidents. Reflections on the training include:

‘I’m not alone in feeling overwhelmed and vulnerable sometimes.’

‘The knowledge in that I won’t be thought less of for taking a break or asking for help as there can always be such a stigma around it when the stakes are high.’

‘The need to connect more with those I am working with despite the difficulties of hybrid working.’

‘Understanding who you are working with and to prioritise what you do.’

Having such training arrangements in place can help incident responders feel seen, understood, and supported.

The Communities Prepared team is currently working with Evie and colleagues at JBA to put together a shared training and exercise offer for communities – more information on this to come in due course. Thanks to JBA and Evie for giving us permission to share their blog here – you can find the original post on the JBA website.

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