Rural Flood Resilience Partnership launches to help farmers adapt to changing climate

A new partnership involving the CLA has launched to improve the resilience of rural communities and businesses to flooding.

The Rural Flood Resilience Partnership unites the CLA with five other organisations – Action with Communities in Rural England (ACRE), the Association of Drainage Authorities (ADA), the Environment Agency, Natural England, and the NFU.

CLA President Victoria Vyvyan said:

"The damage to rural land and businesses from flooding is localised but acute, and the frequency of these events will increase with climate change.

"It is crucial to improve the resilience of rural businesses and communities to flooding. The CLA hopes this partnership will provide the evidence, awareness of risks, and access to practical advice that will allow them to improve their resilience.  

"This partnership will look for short and medium-term solutions whilst raising awareness of the rural-specific costs and challenges from flooding which our members face."

Resilience refers to the capacity of people, communities, and businesses to respond to and bounce back from an event like flooding. While there is often little that people can do to prevent flooding having a serious impact on their home or business, with greater resilience people can reduce their losses and the overall disruption.

The rural-specific aspects of flood resilience have not been researched or communicated as fully as urban aspects, and no organisation alone covers the breadth of issues relating to it. A joint approach is therefore essential to help farmers, land managers, and communities adapt to a changing climate, which will bring more severe flooding.

The partnership will concentrate on three areas:

• evidence to drive the right activity: improving the evidence base on rural-specific vulnerabilities relating to flooding and what will build resilience
• engaging rural communities in flood resilience: increasing awareness about resilience within rural communities, enabling them to better influence decision-making before, during, and after flooding, and promoting their needs
• access to quality support: making it easier for farmers, land managers and communities to access information, support, and funding on flood resilience.

We have now published our first work plan which we will implement between now and 2026, containing 21 actions. Under ‘access to quality support’, for instance, the partnership will provide guidance on farm-specific property-level flood resilience measures, on how farms can recover faster following flooding, and on riparian responsibilities, as well as improving the coordination between risk management authorities.

The CLA will be particularly working to promote funding and incentives for land management that increase flood resilience, and to more accurately characterise the full range of impacts from flooding in rural areas.

The partnership complements the CLA’s policy work on flood mitigation, which you can read in our Programme for Government at pages 74-81. Business-level resilience cannot replace stronger, more effective government policy at a catchment scale to tackle flooding.

After many months of collaboration behind the scenes, it is exciting to share our plans. A website will be launched soon which will be a hub for the resources the partnership publishes. If you have any feedback on our proposals or expertise in rural flood resilience, please do get in touch.