Innovation - The Cumbria Innovative Flood Resilience (CiFR) project
The Cumbria Innovative Flood Resilience (CiFR) project is demonstrating the benefits of Natural Flood Management (NFM) to small rural communities who cannot access funding for traditional flood defences. Many of these communities have suffered multiple flood events and are becoming increasingly vulnerable as climate change is making floods more common and more extreme.
How is the project improving flood resilience?
The project aims to boost community flood resilience through:
Working in four communities at high flood risk
Building on existing work, strengths and experience within Cumbria
Targeting Natural Flood Management (NFM) to maximise flood risk reduction
Supporting communities to prepare for the residual flood risk (remaining risk after interventions) through improving understanding of risk and how to respond
Putting in place monitoring and evaluation to demonstrate and learn from the effectiveness of interventions
Improving understanding of climate change risks
Influencing national (and local) policy and practice
What innovation does the project demonstrate?
CiFR has an innovative, collaborative team structure made up of staff from the host council (Westmorland and Furness), Environment Agency, Cumbria Council, and Natural England.
This structure has enabled them to carry out diverse activities including:
Building relationships with local farmers via two Catchment Sensitive Farming (CSF) advisors employed by Natural England
Modelling what NFM features would work best where and scaling up NFM interventions to maximise flood risk reduction potential.
Paying farmers to install features, alongside existing agri-environment scheme funding (e.g. ELM schemes) to ensure NFM is attractive.
Monitoring the impact of NFM features installed, including on water quality.
Supporting community resilience groups to build their size, skills and stability, and giving them a voice within the local resilience forum, so communities can prepare for and recover from future floods.
Innovations with national reach:
Supporting the development of the national Met Office community resilience training prospectus: following a trial with CiFR’s community groups, it now includes modules on climate change.
Producing quality communications films explaining about NFM which have been used nationally.
For further information about CiFR:
Read CiFR’s Mid-term insights review
Watch the project’s introduction to CiFR video on YouTube
View CiFR’s award winning Slow the Flow films produced in collaboration with Cumbria Wildlife Trust