Hull to get £3.4m flood innovation centre

A new centre to develop new ways of building flood resilience will be established at the University of Hull.

The centre will enable Humber-based SMEs to create innovative solutions to mitigate flood risk, improve response to flood events and increase resilience where complete flood prevention is impossible.

Businesses will be partnered with world-leading academics and researchers to undertake collaborative research and innovation projects. They will have access to state-of-the-art computer-aided design, high performance computing, rapid prototyping and immersion testing labs to develop their ideas.

Collaborations may also involve large companies, other research organisations and agencies to maximise the benefit of investment in SME-led innovations.

Climate change and sea level rise projections suggest that our climate will become stormier, yielding more frequent heavy rainfall events, and that sea levels will rise by 0.35 m by 2060 and 1.0 m by 2110, exacerbating exposure to flooding into the future.

Dr Rob Thomas, Senior Research Fellow in Geomorphology and Flood Risk at the University of Hull said: ‘Flooding presents an enormous risk to businesses in the Humber region, and that risk is only going to increase over the next few decades.

‘Through establishing the Flood Resilience Innovation Centre, we hope to support the Humber region in becoming more resilient, developing innovative products and services to either prevent or mitigate against flood risk in the broadest sense and improve resilience and efficiency of response where and when flood events occur.

‘The Flood Resilience Innovation Centre adds to the portfolio of programmes led by our Energy and Environment Institute that aim to address regional, national and global flood risk and resilience.’

The establishment of the Flood Resilience Innovation Centre follows a successful bid for £1.9m from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

University of Hull researchers have been at the forefront of worldwide research into flood risk, and in November Environment Journal spoke to Dr Dan Parsons about his project to build flood resilience in Vietnam.