Building UK climate resilience through bridging the qualitative-quantitative data divide

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The UK has witnessed several recent high magnitude floods, droughts, coastal floods and storms, such as winter 2015-16 with estimated costs of between £1.3-1.9 billion (Environment Agency 2018). Current climate resilience is based on experiences garnered over short timescales, with conventional approaches to extreme event understanding often based on relatively short series. As such, the accurate estimation and understanding of high-magnitude low-probability events is challenging. However, historical records can contest and contextualise claims of uniqueness, unparalleled magnitude or severity often associated with contemporary extreme storms, floods, droughts or coastal flooding; addressing the data gap presented by short records. Several databases of collated documentary materials exist, detailing both past mundane and extreme climatic and hydrological events, but also detailing how communities and societies have responded, proving valuable information not routinely used in risk assessment, adaption or resilience planning. This project addresses these challenges, by building an interdisciplinary network of researchers and end-users from across a range of disciplines (including humanities, sciences, engineering and social sciences) to identify key research gaps and build a scoping network that will identify an approach to bridge the qualitative-quantitative data gap in the climate and hydrological sciences. In doing so it addresses four of the six key challenge areas identified by the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment: i) Flooding and coastal change risks to communities, businesses and infrastructure; ii) Risks to health, well-being and productivity from higher temperatures; iii) Risks of water deficits in public water supply, and for agriculture, energy generation and industry, with impacts on freshwater ecology; and iv) Risks to natural capital, including soils, coastal, marine and freshwater ecosystems, and biodiversity. There is clear utility and need for such collaboration, as current flood risk assessments are now legally obliged to consider historical information prior to new development planning permission being granted, as part of the planning process. Most water utility drought plans now assess drought risk over long-term timescales through historically informed analysis. However, there remains a need for greater understanding in how to use and present this information, particularly to help inform societal and community resilience. We will hold three workshops to address this challenge. Each workshop will have a particular focus: i) start-up scoping event exploring existent qualitative datasets (@RGS London); ii) workshop focused on bridging across datasets and potential new approaches (@Liverpool); and, iii) exploring how historical information and data can be of greatest utility to the widest audience for improving future climate services and thus for improving resilience (@Met Office archives). A key outcome of the workshops will be the development of a new protocol for bridging the 'data gap' across quantitative-qualitative datasets.The workshops will also address longer-term questions around the potential value of qualitative sources in the provision of more holistic climate services, while creating an interdisciplinary network of experts able to shape such services.