embrace (WP5) Case Study Report: Floods in Northern England

Deeming, Hugh, Davis, Belinda, Fordham, Maureen and Taylor, Richard (2014) embrace (WP5) Case Study Report: Floods in Northern England. Project Report. Northumbria University, Project website and EU Portal.

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Abstract

As one of 5 case studies into community resilience undertaken as part of the emBRACE project across Europe, this study was carried out with the participation and assistance of members of a complex amalgamation of geographical, interest and practice communities situated along the catchment of the River Derwent in the county of Cumbria, north England.
What these investigations also revealed quite clearly was that resilience, as it is defined by the IPCC (2014) is powerfully represented along this catchment. It has, however, been won over a period of years through the experience of repeated (flood) events. It has also been won at higher cost to those directly impacted by those events than to those who have not been. There is clear evidence of the capacity exhibited by the catchment’s social, economic, and environmental systems to cope with a high magnitude flood event as well as with other disturbances. They have also responded to and reorganised themselves in ways that maintain their essential function, identity, and structure and they have adapted and learned, while also perhaps maintaining a capacity for transformation that may only truly be operationalised once some future tipping point is crossed. Whether the next high-magnitude flood to strike pushes one or more of the communities studied here over that remaining threshold remains difficult to assess.

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