Posted on 14/07/21 by Kristen Guida
Are resilience standards up to standard? This Resilience First debate on the proposition “our resilience standards are not up to standard” will make the case that standards have become increasingly burdensome, complex, subjective, and allied to vested commercial interests and need to be reviewed, simplified, and made more accessible. 15 July, register at the link.
City Corporation Riverside Strategy out for consultation The Riverside Strategy, the first of its kind in London, aims to protect the Square Mile against rising sea levels as a result of climate change. The draft plan sets out how the City’s riverside can be transformed into a space that meets flood protection requirements while also providing wider benefits for people living, working, and visiting there. Find out more and contribute your views here.
Job opportunity: TE2100 Strategic Funding Senior Advisor The Environment Agency is looking for a Strategic Funding Senior Advisor for the Thames Estuary 2100 Plan project. The role will shape the funding strategy for TE2100. It will involve long-term planning to identify funding/finance options for delivering the Plan and helping to resolve barriers to funding for flood risk and wider benefits. The deadline to apply has been extended: Find all the details and apply here
Met Office training for sustainability specialists The Met Office’s Industry Consultancy team has developed a new climate training course aimed at sustainability specialists in industry and government who need support with adaptation. The course, ‘Climate Data for Reporting and Decision Making’ has been developed to facilitate this and increase the impact of existing climate services like UKCP18. The course will enable organisations to understand how to use climate data to shape their adaptation planning and engagement with other organisations, understand and prioritise the physical and transition risks from weather and climate change, and act with confidence in the face of increasing drivers for taking action. The training is built around free e-learning modules produced by the Met Office’s UKCP18 team, but this paid service will provide opportunities to network with other delegates and ask questions of experts, plus workshops to explore questions and concepts in depth. The first course will be run online over a week commencing 20th September, and repeated again on the week commencing 22nd November. Find out more and register here.
London SuDS pilot wins excellence award Congratulations to the London Sustainable Drainage (SuDS) Schemes pilot study team – the project has been named winner in the Surface Water Management category of the Flood and Coast Excellence Awards. The study was a partnership project that ran from 2017 to 2021. Funded by the Thames Regional Flood and Coastal Committee (RFCC) and Thames Water, it looked at the cumulative benefits of strategically dispersed small-scale SuDS interventions across a catchment and how changes to funding mechanisms might enable this. The project involved modelling several catchments across London, producing a revised version of the Partnership Funding Calculator, establishing a monitoring programme and constructing SuDS in a number of London boroughs. The successes of the pilot gave the Thames RFCC the confidence to commit a further £1m levy to the SuDS Delivery Pilot to build on the learning from the London Strategic SuDS project.
Why we need to scale up SuDS Our own Bob Ward is quoted in today’s New York Times about Monday’s flash flooding in the north and west of London, which caused a fair amount of damage and disruption.
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