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Collaboration to strengthen resilience to flooding: Greater Manchester Fellowship report
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Collaboration across multiple stakeholders, including the insurance sector, is critical to advance urban resilience. This was a key lesson from the Global Risk and Resilience Fellowship project in Greater Manchester, UK.
In the last decade, Greater Manchester has experienced several significant flood events, resulting in damage to homes, businesses and infrastructure and costing the city region millions of pounds in economic losses.[1] Through the Fellowship project, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) sought to convene key stakeholders to strengthen their shared understanding of the impact of flood risk on the city region’s water infrastructure, the cost of this flood exposure, and the investment required to reduce it.
Working closely with GMCA and regional water supplier United Utilities (UU), the project assessed the cost of UU failing to adapt to flooding, and the related implications for water services in Greater Manchester.
The Fellowship project team worked with partners to understand the flood context across the city region and used a set of criticality criteria, developed with UU and GMCA, to select five of the most critical assets. The criteria included an assessment of the specific flood risk for each asset and its dependencies on other infrastructure. The team then developed a methodology for the assessment of the cost of inaction for these assets
Read the full report here
The methodology focused on:
- Assessing the current and future flood exposure of each of UU’s assets.
- Quantifying the current and future costs of flooding of each asset.
- Providing a qualitative assessment of the most effective and affordable adaptation measures for UU to consider, given the current and future asset risk profile.
Outcomes
GMCA and UU were provided with a robust evaluation of the cost of not adapting that will inform UU and GMCA’s investment strategies. The Fellowship project created a platform to bring together a diverse range of stakeholders to collectively evaluate approaches for pricing risk and make an investment case for adaptation. It demonstrated how a shared understanding of risk and preparedness can improve communication among different stakeholders with shared risks.
The methodology developed by the Fellowship team blended a private sector approach for pricing risk with the expertise and data available to GMCA and UU. The methodology will be a useful tool for other infrastructure providers and utilities as they plan investments to make their infrastructure more resilient to flooding. At a UK level, it is expected that learnings from the Fellowship project will be incorporated into how the Cabinet works with local authorities on resilience planning and the implementation of the UK Government Resilience Framework.
The comments below from Greater Manchester Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) Kathy Oldham and the Fellows who led the project reflect on the importance of this work.
The need to respond to the challenges posed by climate change is becoming increasingly pressing. The work under the Fellowship has accelerated our understanding of the costs of failing to adapt our water infrastructure to the future risk of flooding events. It has also assisted in developing a compelling narrative with a robust evidence base to drive greater investment and action on climate resilience.
Over the past few months, I’ve had an amazing experience working closely with the talented teams at Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and United Utilities (UU), and with the broader stakeholder groups including Electricity North West (ENW), Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM), JBA, and Rebalance Earth. It has been incredibly rewarding to produce useful, concrete outputs, including providing UU with actionable insights for their adaptation and resilience-building investment strategy, as well as assisting the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government in establishing a framework for resilient investment planning at national and local levels.
Through the Fellowship project, I was able to use the general insurance knowledge I apply to my daily work to provide the Fellowship team with an insurance perspective when considering the impact of flood on United Utilities’ assets and Greater Manchester more broadly. I have had the opportunity to meet different people within Howden and outside the business, and I enjoyed learning about their thoughts on risk. Working with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority has been very insightful.