The UK legal system must adapt to mitigate the impact of flooding, say Patrick Gleave & Ashley Groombridge
- Flooding is a serious issue affecting businesses and the lives of millions of people.
- Reducing the risk and impact of flooding requires landscape scale co-operation between public bodies and multiple landowners.
- There is a need for easy to establish, long term, adaptable agreements which bind tenants and successive landowners.
Last winter was dominated by the human misery caused by flooding in the Lake District and other parts of Northern England. It’s been only a few short years since the country last suffered from extreme flooding events—the images of train lines hanging freely at Dawlish and the large expanses of water in the Somerset Levels are etched in the memory. The clean-up costs ran to billions. There is an increasing recognition that land management is key to this as described, albeit in strong terms, by George Monboit in The Guardian (“Do little, hide the evidence: the official neglect that caused these deadly floods”, 7 December 2015).
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