East Anglia sea level rise infrastructure update

Community Engagement  1, ... 12, 13, 14, 15 & 16

[ Update 3: the next installment includes Environment Agency's flood defence data

Update 2: here is an update via Enviro. Agency's outreach twitter @FutureFens

Update 1: here is a story map augmenting the last two posts with live maps... enjoy! ]

Following on the previous timelines update focusing on Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combine Authority, this is an East Anglia-wide update based on Environment Agency (EA) Survey,  Office for National Statistics (ONS) Geoportal and Ordnance Survey (OS) Open Zoomstack data. 

Rather than end with a slide deck as  before, let's start with it for this update (ignore the blog post link that is here):

Let's spend some time now on the so-called bivariate mapping introduced above. Here is the map:

click to enlarge, full size

To the left are ONS' 2019 Index of Deprivation (IoD) mapped against Income Rank: it shows in lighter shades the more deprived areas (as noted, lower digit is higher IoD); they center around the lowlands and peat lands to the north. To the right are Sea Level Rise modelled from OS data against Risk of Flooding lifted as-is from EA data: it shows in darker shades the areas more vulnerable to flooding from rivers or from inundation; this time they center around the central subsea areas, which as noted aren't inundated today but run the highest risk in case of inundation from sea level rise. 

This quantifies the qualitative description in the Cottenham Open intro story map of peatlands shrinking during the 18th c. drainage of the Fens, thus creating a slight uphill for rivers toward the North Sea, and resulting in the drainage & pumping infrastructure dating back to that time.

Now let's look at the population and flood defense distribution. You can see the populated clusters of Peterborough, Ely and Cambridge at 10, 4 and 6 on a clock face:

click to enlarge, full size

It's hard to see the detailed flood defenses, so here's a close-up of King's Lynn, on the forefront of sea level rise inundation as it's on the North Sea coast along the Wash. Note the jaggedness at this relatively large scale reflects the 50m. resolution regional topography data from OS Open Data.

click ot enlarge, full size

Live maps will be posted for all these, so that you can explore this further by overlaying, panning and zooming all of the above... Stay tuned!