Flood risk to new homes in England and Wales will increase in disadvantaged areas

The building of new homes continues in flood-prone parts of England and Wales, and losses from flooding remain high. A new study, which looked at a recent decade of house building, concluded that a disproportionate number of homes built in struggling or declining neighbourhoods will end up in high flood-risk areas due to climate change.

The study, by Viktor Rözer and Swenja Surminski from the Grantham Research Institute, used property-level data for new homes and information on the socio-economic development of neighbourhoods to analyse spatial clusters of disproportional increase in the flood exposure of newly built homes and investigated how these patterns evolve in different climate change scenarios. Their findings, which discuss the issues of spending on flood defences and the role of spatial planning in adopting to climate change, are END