GovWire

Changes to flood and coastal erosion risk information

The Environment Agency is publishing new national risk information for flooding and coastal erosion. This includes future scenarios accounting for climate change.

This guidance provides information on these important changes and our phased approach to publication.

We have published:

• 28 January 2025: New National Flood Risk Assessment (NaFRA) Risk of flooding from rivers and sea and Risk of flooding from surface water data.
• 28 January 2025: NewNational Coastal Erosion Risk Map (NCERM) data.
• 17 December 2024: A National assessment of flood and coastal erosion risk in England 2024 report - this report is a summary of our new NaFRA and NCERM data

We plan to publish:

• 25 March 2025: New NaFRA2 Flood zone data on Flood map for planning and available on data.gov.uk - this service allows developers and planners to find the data they need to undertake flood risk assessments

New national flood risk assessment (NaFRA)

Our newNaFRA:

• provides a single picture of current and future?flood risk from rivers and the sea, and from surface water
• uses both existing detailed local information and improved national data
• includes the potential impact of climate change on flood risk, based on UK Climate Projections (UKCP18)
• shows potential flood depths
• provides much higher resolution maps that make it easier to see where there is risk

Access the new NaFRA data

The new NaFRA data is available on:

• Check your long term flood risk
• data.gov.uk

We also published a summary of the newNaFRA data in the National assessment of flood and coastal erosion risk in England 2024report.

Improvements to our national flood risk mapping

The Environment Agency has updated our flood risk information using a new process. This has been developed for our new national flood risk assessment. The process combines new and existing data to improve our national flood risk maps.

This includes:

• outputs from detailed local flood risk models
• a new state-of-the-art national flood risk model

Local modelling of flood risk often captures important local features better than national modelling.

The new national model is a significant improvement on our existing national modelling. We will use outputs from this national model in areas where we do not have high-quality local modelling.

The new process has resulted in a range of improvements to our national flood risk mapping, including:

• greater consistency between local and national flood risk information
• additional risk information, including flood depth
• finer spatial resolution for flood risk from rivers and sea

We invited lead local flood authorities and coastal risk management authorities to review a draft version of our:

• new surface water maps
• coastal flood risk maps

This ensured they were as high quality as possible ahead of publication.

Future scenarios accounting for climate change

We have published new national flood risk information accounting for climate change. We are generating future scenarios usingclimate change allowances.

These are scenarios of anticipated change for:

• peak river flow
• peak rainfall intensity
• sea level rise
• offshore wind speed and extreme wave height

Detail for our professional partners

We make national flood risk data freely and openly available to a wide range of users via theDefra Data Services Platform(DSP). TheDSPprovides the best available information on flood risk. This helps organisations with a role in flood risk management or with a need to plan their own operations.

We have published new flood risk information on theDSPincluding:

• scenarios accounting for climate change
• maps of flood depth

There have been changes to data formats and structures. You will need to change your processing steps if you are a regular user of the data published on theDSP.

You can find more detail about these changes on theDefraDSPSupport pages. The page provides detail on:

• the datasets we are publishing
• how to access the data
• changes to formats and schema for our existing datasets
• the datasets we will not initially replace

Further updates to our flood risk information

We plan to update our flood risk information regularly to reflect new local information.

This includes:

• new local flood models that we have created
• data provided by third parties, subject to business requirements

We paused regular updates in the lead up to publishing the new flood risk maps. We plan to resume regular flood risk updates from summer 2025.

We will provide notifications to indicate where there is new local flood risk information.

We will do this on the:

• check your long term flood riskwebsite
• flood map for planningportal

New national coastal erosion risk map (NCERM)

Our new NCERM:

• provides the most up to date national picture of coastal erosion risk for England
• is based on coastal monitoring data from theNational Network of Regional Coastal Monitoring Programmes- this includes 10 years more evidence on coastal processes since the original map was published
• accounts for theUK Climate Projections (UKCP18) which includes allowances for sea level rise

It reflects the latest coastal management approaches set out inshoreline management plans (SMPs). Our assessment identifies the impacts of coastal erosion. It does this withSMPsbeing funded and delivered compared to the worst case where theSMPsare not funded or delivered.

Access the new NCERM data

The new NCERM data is available on:

• check coastal erosion risk for an area in England
• shoreline Management Plan Explorer and shoreline management plans guidance
• data.gov.uk

We also published a summary of the newNCERMdata in the 