Living With Environmental Change event

This blog was created as part of the original Valuing Nature Network (2011-2014)

Last week I also went to the Living With Environmental Change event in Birmingham - this is a partnership of organisations that fund and use environmental research and as you can guess covers a huge range of topics, from flooding to climate change. 

I'm not even going to attempt to summarise the whole event, but to say that my favourite talk was from Paul Leinster from the Environment Agency about making decisions around flooding and how best to communicate this to the people whose lives are going to be affected.

This struck a chord with me as he talked about the big sea surge on the east coast of England in 2007 where the wind, waves and the tide combined to produce a massive 2.6 m surge. This is over 8 and a half feet!

For anyone who has been to east anglia, where much of the land is at or even below sea-level this would be a massive cause for concern. 7,500 people from the town of Great Yarmouth were on standby to be evacuated but fortunately the surge peaked before the high tide and the surge was not as high as predicted.

You can watch Paul's talk on youtube and see all of the day's speakers here.