Messing with natural habitats only makes flooding worse

Tony Juniper in the Independent (UK): Recent flooding has caused widespread misery, disruption and large-scale economic damage. One sector that has been hard hit is insurance. Because flooding is becoming more frequent due to climate change, some areas are becoming uninsurable. Some 200,000 properties could soon see withdrawal of flood insurance and talks between government and the Association of British Insurers are yet to reach agreement on how insurance cover might be continued for those properties at highest risk.

Alongside debates on how to maintain insurance cover, another natural focus in the wake of deluges of the kind recently experienced is about the quality and extent of traditional flood defences. All this is fine, but for me there is a piece missing. It relates to both these questions and is about the vital role that could be played by so-called ‘green infrastructure’.

While the risk of flooding can be reduced at least in the short-term through the building of hard defences (such as higher levies and bigger storm drains), approaches that go more with the flow of nature can be both cheaper and more effective. For example, peat bogs on hills store rainwater and release it slowly into streams and rivers. When the bogs are damaged, heavy rain runs off more quickly and can cause problems below.

...With these and many other experiences in mind, various bodies including conservation groups, water companies and local authorities are beginning to invest in trees and peatland restoration as cost-effective measures to reduce flood risk (and improve water quality). Peat and trees also contain a lot of carbon, so this way of cutting flood risk is also a way to help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the air....

Damage from the 2007 flood in Sheffield, UK, shot by Dave Pickersgill, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Ignoring natural capital could see countries' credit ratings downgraded

Will Nichols in Business Green: Degradation of a country's so-called natural capital could exacerbate the sovereign debt crises that have helped trigger, and deepen, the global economic downturn, the UN warned yesterday. A report by the UN Environment Programme's Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) says loss of soils, forests, and fisheries, as well as rising resource costs, are likely to become increasingly important to a nation's economic health – and may therefore affect its ability to repay or refinance sovereign debt.

However, despite the US, Spain, Italy and Greece all seeing their sovereign debt downgraded since 2011, environmental factors are still being overlooked by the models used to determine sovereign credit ratings.

The UN's analysis of France, Japan, India, Turkey and Brazil found all five countries are pushing their ecological assets to the limit and lowering their resilience to natural resources risks, such as spikes in commodity prices.

India, for example, is currently demanding almost twice as much from its ecological assets than they can sustainably provide, and this gap is growing. The report argues that population growth means an increasing amount of the country's natural resource requirements will have to be met through imports. As such, the country's ability to cope with commodity price shocks will continue to diminish, potentially undermining its credit-rating.

Meanwhile, France is sweating its natural resources at a level 1.4 times that which can be sustainably provided and Japan could only meet 35 per cent of its natural resource needs domestically in 2008, down from 73 per cent in 1961....

Mount Fuji and cherry blossoms, shot by Midori, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license