Briefing: community resilience to extreme weather

The global climate is changing in ways that are likely to have a significant impact on society and the natural and built environments over the coming decades. Extreme weather events, both globally and in the UK, appear to be increasing in frequency and severity, and there is growing concern that the cost of managing them and their impacts will increase. Preparedness and resilience measures can help to mitigate impacts and associated costs to both infrastructure and to people. A new multi-institutional research programme involving 13 universities in the UK called Crew (community resilience to extreme weather) has recently started, which will develop a tool kit to support decision making and will therefore improve the capacity for resilience of local communities to the impacts of future extreme weather. The broad aim is to develop a set of web-based tools for mapping potential future extreme weather events, for assessing their impacts under a range of scenarios, and to evaluate and offer a range of potential coping measures. As part of this the project will identify existing coping measures for dealing with extreme weather events at the levels of the community, buildings and individuals. The work will assess coping measures in terms of their suitability for the climate and buildings in the UK, their effectiveness for risk reduction and technical aspects that may affect their uptake. This will therefore provide the basis for the development of more effective coping measures for the community, including households, small businesses and local policy makers.