One of the serendipitous delights of this visit to the UK is
the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The city is almost overwhelmed with visitors
from all over the world, flocking through the streets in search of the fun and
frivolity of the Fringe.
It can also be a bit much. The main streets and places like
the Royal Mile are all but immovable, and the tourists (yes, that’s me too, I
know) have taken over. I’m pretty sure that you’re not really supposed to pet
police horses, for example, but the pair I observed yesterday were taking it
all very patiently. Does it count as bribing a police officer if you’re making
friends with his horse?
Luckily, I had the insights of an almost-local. Vanessa Collins lives just over the border in Newcastle and she braved the slightly
dysfunctional rail network on Thursday morning to pop over for some brunch, a
chat about water resource management and a viewing of Austentatious.
I think Edinburgh forgot it was still summer, and I woke up
to mist snuggled up around the castle and the Scott monument. The Georgian
terraces were equal parts obscured by mist and road works (apparently one must
not mention the tram works. At all.), but the brunch was excellent (if you’re
after something tasty and inexpensive, try Cafe Milk).
Vanessa is working for the Environment Agency, an
extraordinarily large public agency in the UK responsible for sustainable
development and environmental management, including water licensing and flood
risk management. Apparently there are over 10,000 staff in the agency, working all over England.
Vanessa is a civil engineer working as a project manager in the flood risk
management area. England is trying to find ways to reduce flood risks to lower
catchment towns, using a range of engineering solutions, including building
bigger flood walls in towns, and finding ways to store more water in the upper
catchment. What I find most interesting about this issue is that climate change
is likely to make floods more frequent, and more extreme, but probably less
predictable. So how do you invest in the flood mitigation measures, knowing
that you’ll really need them at some future point, but until then, they aren’t
really useful at all? Even more challenging: how do you hold space in a water
storage to retain flood waters when storage levels are dropping? The corollary
of increased flooding under climate change is that periods of low flow and drought
are also likely to be more frequent. From what I can tell, this is less of a
problem here in England than it is in Australia, for example, but it wasn’t so
long ago that parts of England were drought stricken. Managing uncertainty and
variability requires a new mindset, and it’s one that sits uncomfortably
alongside accounting measures of capital investment. I think there’s going to
be some interesting learning curves as our understanding of the new hydrology
of many of our river systems develops over time.
I’m reminded of the work of Chris Spray at the University of
Dundee in the Eddleston catchment, where upstream storage mechanisms are being
enhanced using a combination of engineering solutions and ecosystem services
like re-inserting meanders in the river, building wetlands and revegetating
upper catchments. Researchers at the University of Newcastle are also working
with the Environment Agency on a range of catchment management approaches to
mitigate flooding in Belford (check out this and this).
None of these activities are cost free, and they all impose
a trade-off between what you can use the water, space and money for now, as opposed to what you might need
to use it for in the next flood. We don’t know when that will be, but we do
know it will happen.
After all that, it seemed only logical to weave our way
through Edinburgh’s mist-shrouded streets and parks, claim a space in the
queue, and enjoy the hilarity of Austentatious. Improv comedy in the style of
Jane Austen: who could ask for more?
No comments:
Post a Comment