Improving Scotland’s flood resilience

A National Flood Advisory Service will be established to improve Scotland’s flood resilience and embed best practice on a nationwide scale.

The service is one of the actions in Scotland’s first National Flood Resilience Strategy, published today. It will provide support and advice on building flood resilience to delivery partners and communities, and provide the governance framework for progressing high value flood actions such as flood protection schemes.

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
• improvements to how data is used to inform decision making and raise community awareness of current and future flood exposure.

The scale of the challenge Scotland faces in response to climate change means that actions within the strategy are designed to extend beyond “fixing” individual flooding problems to creating flood resilient places and communities.

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.

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.”

The Strategy will be delivered via an implementation plan that will take forward policy development for six priority action areas, starting with the establishment of the Flood Advisory Service.

Background

• The National Flood Resilience Strategy builds on existing Scottish Government support for flood resilience and strong partnership working including working with, amongst others, SEPA, local authorities, Scottish Water and NatureScot.
• The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) also publishes its Potentially Vulnerable Area (PVA) consultation digest today
• Since 2008, the Scottish Government has made available £42 million per year to local authorities to invest in flood risk management actions – a commitment that is in place until 2026.   

• The 2020 Programme for Government committed an additional £150 million over the course of this Parliament for flood risk management actions.  
• The Strategy is part of The Scottish National Adaptation Plan 2024-2029
• More information on the National Flood Advisory Service will be made available in due course

Pic credit: A Robertson