Dr Grant Wright from the School of the Built Environment has been awarded a £49,000 grant from the Scottish Government to enhance and continue to deliver an interactive flooding and community resilience workshop developed under a previous EPSRC Partnerships for Public Engagement grant.
The original workshop used an interactive physical model to illustrate some of the key issues around urban flooding, and was delivered to around 5000 people at UK science festivals, as well as more focussed public engagement activities, for example to support public consultations on a sustainable drainage retrofit project in Central London.
Since initial funding finished in 2011, Dr Wright has been working with the Scottish Government and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) on an ad-hoc basis to deliver the workshop at a range of different events. The new funding will be used both to enhance the workshop, through incorporation of community resilience messages and the development of a related school lesson plan, and to deliver the workshop to a further fifty Scottish schools during 2013/14.
The new work is focussed on "embedding" key messages in the adults of the future and will also help prompt the building of individual, family and wider community resilience to the impact of flooding. In this respect it will complement existing educational work being undertaken by SEPA and others to raise flood risk awareness amongst the wider population.
The project will also offer SBE PhD students the opportunity to become involved in the workshop and hence help build key communication skills.