Research and Education

In 2023, Project Groundwater set up a research partnership with the Open University (OU), sponsored a PhD, and collaborated with a fellow Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation Programme (FCRIP) project to conduct research into the mental health impacts of groundwater flooding.

Both the OU academic partnership and the PhD are focused on the agency and capacity of communities, and the innovative ways we can work with, build trust, support and empower communities to be more resilient.

Early findings from both this year have highlighted the importance of researching the context in which groundwater flooding happens. A deeper understanding of this, together with understanding the particular characteristics of our communities, will help to guide Project Groundwater’s community-based resilience activities. Both projects will look to share findings and learning through published papers and presenting at conferences which will be an important legacy of Project Groundwater.

The Open University Partnership

The Open University partnership work this year has been focused on what ‘community resilience’ means as a concept. Dr. Karen Potter has been leading the work, which included a literature review. This found that the concept of ‘resilience’ is all too often vague and ambiguous, with an ongoing academic and policy debate as to what resilience means in practice.

To help address this, Karen co-authored a Working Paper in collaboration with Project Groundwater’s Engagement Stream lead, Dr Sarah Fitton. ‘Community Resilience and Engagement’ aims to stimulate discussion and debate within the partnership as to what ‘community resilience’ means. Drawing from a review of existing literature, it includes a call for greater understanding of resilience, of groundwater flooding, and of the ways that communities can be supported and empowered.

Karen has also been identifying opportunities for the qualitative evaluation of resilience this year. This has included working with the Environment Agency to pilot ‘resilience indicators’ - the things could better represent how resilient a community is, such as awareness and understanding of flooding risk. Karen has been working closely with the Project workstreams to help define research questions for communities and hopes that the resulting data will help us to inform our thinking about the challenges that communities face. It will also help us to monitor and evaluate the Project.

PhD Research

Claude Nsobya commenced his PhD research in October 2022 at the Open University, sponsored by Project Groundwater. He has been working with a supervisory team split across the Open University, University of West of England, and members of the Project Groundwater core team.

Claude is looking in particular at the relationship between community resilience and community involvement in flood risk management in under explored contexts. He conceptualizes resilience as the community’s capacity to resist, absorb, recover and adapt to floods.

His work began this year by tracing ‘resilience capacity' through the academic literature for a deeper understanding of what this means. This raised many questions for Claude including:

  • Do descriptions of resilience capacity in literature and policy align with actual experiences and perceptions of communities and those engaging with them?
  • Can community engagement can be truly inclusive, and if so, how inclusivity is achieved?
  • Can there be early and long-term involvement of communities, and how is this ensured?

His case study research will be focused in three areas: Project Groundwater’s nine pilot communities, Project Groundwater Northumbria and a government led project in Uganda. This will help to improve understanding of resilience challenges and strategies in the Global South. In 2023 he submitted an abstract to an international conference and hopes learning from his research will be shared at an international level with other authorities and communities.

PhD Research Student Claude Nsobya

Claude Nsobya undertaking fieldwork for his PhD in Uganda, interviewing the Ntungamo District Local Government

Research into the impact of groundwater flooding on mental health

In 2023, Project Groundwater collaborated with Project Groundwater Greater Lincolnshire to tackle an important and poorly understood area. Research to look at the mental health and wellbeing impacts of flooding was established to address three central questions:

  1. What actions can we take to have the greatest positive impact on mental health before, during and after a flood?
  2. How do we change our approach to focus on people not property?
  3. What is the realistic economic cost of mental health – direct (the person) and indirect (others).

The work is being led by Project Groundwater Greater Lincolnshire. This year they started to look at setting up a long-term academic led partnership to commission the next major piece of national research in this area.

Jed Ramsay (centre) with Vicky Jones (left) and Brett Rycroft-Jones (right) from Project Groundwater Greater Lincolnshire

Legacy

A key part of Project Groundwater’s focus will be thinking about the legacy of its work. This year, work began on our legacy strategy. The strategy will consider and set out how the learning and insight we gather throughout Project Groundwater, including new property flood resilience measures, will be shared.

A growing network and lasting legacy

Within Defra's Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation programme (FCRIP), which funds Project Groundwater, there are two other projects already focusing on groundwater flooding, based in Northumbria and Greater Lincolnshire.

In 2023, Project Groundwater was nominated as FCRIP lead for these groundwater projects and took on a greater role in leading initiatives for closer working and collaboration. This has seen the Projects either leading, funding and or collaborating across topics including: the impacts of flooding on mental health, resilience and Property Flood Resilience (PFR) research and an appraisal of the economic impacts of groundwater flooding, in conjunction with Middlesex University’s Flood Hazard Research Centre.

To reflect the ongoing collaboration between the three Projects, Northumbria and Greater Lincolnshire took on the Project Groundwater brand in 2023, adding their locations to underline their regional focus. Together, we became the Project Groundwater network.

This year, with support from the Environment Agency, we began thinking about how we could build on our existing network of three Projects and help bring together a growing body of organisations and individuals interested in groundwater flooding. This could be a national network, or a national organisation in time. Whatever shape it takes, the aim will be to continue fostering conversations, sharing ideas and learning, and advocating for policy change to ensure that groundwater flooding continues to receive the focus, change and resources it needs. It will be a key part of our legacy.

Vivian Pham (Environment Agency), Matthew Rountree (Project Groundwater Northumbria) and Councillor Jilly Jordan (Buckinghamshire Council) using Lego at our Annual Summit to support the building of our Legacy Strategy

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