SCOTLAND is to establish a national flood advisory service to improve the country’s resilience and embed best practice on a nationwide scale.
The service will provide support and advice on building flood resilience to delivery partners and communities, as well as enabling the governance framework for progressing high value flood actions such as flood protection schemes.
The initiative is one of the actions within Scotland’s first national flood resilience strategy, which looks to undertake actions that are designed to extend beyond just fixing individual flooding problems to instead creating flood resilient places and communities.
Other key actions include work to improve our understanding of how urban and rural landscapes can be adapted for flood mitigation, support for a broader range of flood actions including smaller flood protection schemes and property level flood resilience, and improvements to how data is used to inform decision making and raise community awareness of current and future flood exposure.
An additional £15 million has been set aside in the draft 2025-2026 Scottish budget to support the delivery of the strategy, wider flooding resilience, and coastal adaptation work.
Scottish Government acting cabinet secretary for net zero and energy, Gillian Martin, said, “Floods like we saw in October 2023 during Storm Babet show that global warming is already influencing weather events in Scotland. Over the coming decades, we will see greater economic, social and environmental impacts as sea levels rise, and rainfall intensities and river flows increase because of climate change. By 2080, it is estimated that the number of properties at risk of flooding in Scotland could rise from 284,000 to almost 400,000.
“Our national flood resilience strategy therefore puts communities at its heart – with a focus on building community flood resilience and reducing the impacts of flooding on people, businesses, and housing. It supports an increase in the range and rate of delivery of actions both to manage our flood exposure, and to reduce the impacts of flooding when it does occur.
“This builds on work already under way to create more flood resilient places. In addition to the £42 million we provide annually to local authorities for flood resilience, we have committed an additional £150 million over the course of this Parliament to deliver improved flood resilience and we propose to commit a further £15 million as part of our draft budget for 2025-26.”
