Multiple benefits

Scotland’s Flood Resilience Conference 2025 was held in Edinburgh on the 28th and 29th January. The theme of the conference was on taking action to implement the Flood Resilience Stratergy. Organised by Verture, the event built on Scotland’s first National Flood Resilience Strategy, published in December 2024. With sub-themes of People, Place and Process and multiple breakout sessions, the event aimed to share good practice, inspire and provide learning opportunities to establish a new level of cross-sector collaboration.

SpongeScapes is a Horizon Europe project uniting 14 case studies across Europe to advance the understanding and implementation of sponge measures—nature-based solutions that restore landscapes' natural capacity to absorb, temporarily store, and slowly release water. These measures play a vital role in mitigating floods, droughts, and other climate impacts while delivering co-benefits such as improved water quality, biodiversity, and community well-being.

Visit our website (link below) to explore the science, case studies, and training opportunities

The Floods and Droughts Research Infrastructure (FDRI) is now establishing a long term monitoring programme in the UK. FDRI is an innovative long-term programme which, for the first time in the UK, will monitor the whole hydrological system, to improve resilience to floods and droughts. FDRI will advance our understanding of how, when and where floods and droughts occur, enabling improved predictions, robust assessment of impacts and implementation of appropriate mitigation measures.

A National Flood Resilience Strategy for Scotland has been published by the Scottish Government. The strategy sets out a vision for a flood resilient Scotland through to 2045 and beyond. It is structured around the themes of People, Places and Processes. There are four guiding principles laid out in the Strategy that will help embed flood resilience into climate adaptation and place-making and engage as many contributors as possible to deliver as broad a range of actions as possible.

A report has just been published by scientists at the James Hutton Institute, SRUC and University of Aberdeen that assesses the socio-economic impacts of soil degradation on Scotland’s water environment. The work was commissioned by Scotland's Centre of Expertise for Waters. 

The 2024 British Hydrological Society National Symposium will be held at the University of Oxford on the 23rd and 24th September. This major two-day event will showcase research across the hydrological community and include presentations, workshops, discussions, field visit and conference dinner. The field visit this year includes a walk around the site of the proposed Oxford Alleviation Scheme where you will have an opportunity to understand the flood mechanisms within Oxford and hear about the plans for the scheme.  
 

The Scottish Government is seeking views on Scotland's first Flood Resilience Strategy. The strategy will focus what needs to be done to make communities more flood resilient over the coming decades. The consultation paper seeks views on the proposed principles that will guide the Flood Resilience Strategy under the three key themes of people, places, and processes. The Flood Resilience Strategy public consultation will remain open until 13 August 2024.

Sniffer hosted Scotland's Flood Resilience Conference at Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh on 8 - 9 February 2024. This was a hybrid event and almost 700 people attended across the two days. Sessions at the event included community resilience, coastal change and funding for multiple drivers. Presentations and videos from the event are now available on the Sniffer website. 

The Engineering with Nature initiative (led by US Army Corps of Engineers) has now published "Engineering with Nature: An Atlas, volume 3". The atlas contains lots of global case studies that are using NbS inspired approaches. 58 projects (including several cases from the UK) are highlighted in this latest version which is available to download via the link below. 

We are reaching out to you with an exciting opportunity to contribute to research on River woodland evidence gaps. This survey should take approximately 20 minutes to complete (ideally on a laptop or desktop).