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Is Britain flooding more than before?

February 25, 2003

Are river floods becoming more common? Are they bigger than they used to be? According to the results of a study to be published online today in Journal of Quaternary Science, researchers from the University of Wales in Aberystwyth demonstrate that Britain is now flooding more than in the past due to deforestation.

Accurate instrumental records of flooding only go back a few decades making it difficult to determine long-term trends in the magnitude and frequency of flooding events. It is therefore important that scientists go back beyond instrumental records to assess the long-term trends in flooding to allow accurate comparisons of flooding now and in the past.

Professors Mark Macklin and John Lewin of the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth analysed nearly 350 radiocarbon dated flood deposits preserved in river valleys on UK floodplains.

What emerges is a series of clusters that indicate severe and frequent flooding, notably around 8000 years ago and particularly since 4000 years ago. Many of these clusters correlate with independent records of the climate at the time, clearly indicating the expected association between flooding and climate change.

The results also demonstrate the critical importance of land use changes. It is clear that the flood risk has been exacerbated over the last 4000 years, since the Bronze Age, by the conversion of woodland to agricultural grassland. Trees intercept rainfall, return some directly back to the atmosphere through evapotranspiration and release the rest slowly, meaning that water takes longer to reach rivers, and flooding is lessened.

In the future the major impact of global warming in Britain will be an increase in winter precipitation and storminess. When such changes have occurred in the past as a result of natural climate change this has resulted in more floods, but these floods were less severe when the landscape is wooded. Our landscape is now less wooded than at any point over the past 11,500 years, so according to Mark Macklin, "if we wish to mitigate the effects of big floods in the future we need to start planting more trees, and fast. "

John Wiley & Sons

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