CIWEM's CEO Terry Fuller asks: how should Flood and Coast 2021 shape COP26?

If you had your moment on the stage at COP26 what would you say? That is the question we are putting to every attendee at this year’s Flood and Coast conference and exhibition, inviting answers from across our entire programme.

Coastal and inland flooding ranks as the highest risk on the UK national register of natural hazards and is among the early manifestations of climate change in many other countries.

The narrative on climate change has shifted recently to press more strongly for adaptation and building resilience. In March 2021, at the Climate and Development Ministerial, COP26 president Alok Sharma stated that as host, the UK’s goals include facilitating greater action on adaptation.

The flood and coastal risk management (FCRM) sector is ahead of many others in understanding and implementing adaptation measures through strategic planning and design.

Examples include shoreline management plans, introduced in 1995, which encouraged an adaptive approach by considering three epochs up to a 100-year horizon. This insight, coupled with the threats that so many nations face, obliges us to share what we know.

The COP26 presidency identified several needs and desired practices that align well with established and developing practice in the FCRM sector in the UK and other parts of the world. These include:

• Mainstreaming climate risk and adaptation into government-wide national planning and budgeting
• The value of national adaptation plans and communications
• Climate modelling and data to facilitate early action
• Integrating nature-based solutions into national planning
• Locally led adaptation to bring local actors into decisions about climate adaptation
• Building capacity to share good practice and scalable solutions to replicate across sectors and different country contexts
• Crucially, improving the resilience of infrastructure and critical services.

The discussions at Flood and Coast 2021 will build on strong themes from the conference’s 2020 digital series and from other CIWEM inputs.

The first is that we must put climate adaptation and resilience at the heart of everything we do. Our event in February highlighted how mandatory and voluntary reporting overlooks this and that governments should mandate it.

Regulation should drive adaptation planning but it is reporting that can help to change behaviours, to cut reliance on regulation and elicit support and engagement. We also advocate involving local communities in adaptation planning. People need to know what to do in an extreme climate event – and it takes local work to deliver this knowledge and appropriate responses.

Our appeal will include doing more for the most vulnerable.

In the interview that opens June's issue of The Environment, International Centre for Climate Change and Development director Dr Saleemul Huq points out that only 20 per cent of climate funding goes to adaptation and 2 per cent to vulnerable communities.

We will reinforce the COP26 presidency’s conclusions about why collaboration matters, with the message that adaptation and resilience comes from organisations working across all their operations, especially their supply chains.

Messages from the COP26 presidency and from the FCRM community are in alignment. The need for adaptation is so urgent that leaders at COP26 must move from themes into action. Flood and Coast brings together the world’s finest practitioners in a sector that has put these themes into practice for decades. CIWEM plans to share what it knows with participants at COP26 and others with an interest, before and during the event.

Terry Fuller is chief executive of CIWEM

Flood and Coast 2021 will look at innovation and efficiency in flood modelling and forecasting, examples of SuDS successes and challenges, managing multiple risks and how to better plan and maintain assets. It will discuss the benefits of resilient development and property flood resilience, and present behavioural insights and feedback from the National PFR Pathfinders.

You can purchase a four-day pass for the whole conference, featuring VIP access to all sessions, networking and the exhibition, or one-day tickets for specific sessions. We are also offering visitor passes to access the networking and expo areas. To register for the event, and for full programme details, click here.