The risk of flooding is increasing in many areas around the world. Conventionally, protecting homes, businesses, infrastructure and farmland from damage and disruption is achieved through engineered flood defences. An alternative approach to flood risk management (and other hazard management) that is gaining interest in policy and academic circles is to work with nature and natural processes. Such nature-based solutions (NBS), if adopted widely, would represent a big shift in hazard management. An established NBS is natural flood management (NFM), for instance in a 2020 Policy Statement on flood and coastal erosion risk management the UK government highlighted how it is promoting and investing in NFM. NFM interventions comprise options such as tree planting, reconnecting rivers to floodplains, and woody debris dams. Implementation of NFM interventions at different scales – field, localised, and catchment – will alter the visual landscape and potentially change the public’s understandings of risk.
The PhD project will assess the preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) of the general public for a shift in the approach to flood risk management and specifically for different types of NFM interventions. To achieve these research aims this interdisciplinary project will utilise spatial analysis (such as GIS), visualisation, qualitative analysis, and environmental economics techniques, specifically a choice experiment.
For more information on the supervisor for this project, please go here https://people.uea.ac.uk/r_bark
This is a PhD programme. The start date is 1st October 2021. The mode of study is full time. The studentship length is 3 years.
Entry requirements: 2:1 in Economics, Environmental/Ecological economics, Environmental Sciences, Natural Sciences Geography. Statistical and GIS competency is desired.
Continue with Facebook
