As the Paris global climate negotiations get under way, we in Britain face the prospect of increased flooding. . What can we do about it?

Gresham College in the City of London was founded in 1597 and over 400 years has provided a range of free lectures on different subjects to those who live and work in London. One recent lecture was The next big flood, Britain underwater.  Pod Academy's Lee Millam went to talk to Professor Carolyn Roberts about the facts, figures and ideas in her lecture, which was part of Gresham College's Britain in Troubled Waters series.

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The UK has a series of problems associated with flooding.  One of them is to do with the physical things that are creating the flooding - intense rainfall, high windspeeds in oceans, sea levels, storminess and so on.  Another significant element is how we manage it, what we do about managing both the water and the damage the water creates when it gets into inappropriate places like people's living rooms. The third element is to do with the ways things are shifting as the climate shifts, so that the risks are becoming more intense, particularly in certain parts of the country.  So it is a complex, threefold problem.

Climate change is part of what we are talking about, but flooding is a natural phenomenon - rivers have always over topped their banks (they almost never 'burst' their banks).  We have altered the environment very significantly with what we do, how we farm, the way we constrain rivers etc, so it's a mixture of a naturally induced phenomenon (flooding always happens) and the result  of how we behave in circumstances close to rivers and close to the coast.

In 2007 we had some very severe flooding over quite wide areas of England and Wales and from that we have learned a lot.  One of the things that happened after those floods was changes in administrative arrangements for the management of flooding, although I'd say those are still to be tested in reality.

The other thing that happened following the 2007 flood was that considerable amounts of money were put into research and that has been an astonishing British success story in terms of understanding how floods are generated, where flood water goes, predicting and forecasting events - we are now pretty good with the science, but we're a lot less good and have learned far fewer lessons about the politics of managing flooding.  So that is, perhaps, where we need to turn our attention now.

In terms of the way we manage floods and the way politicians behave, at both local and national level they have an eye to the short term, so they are concerned about the next election when their role in their constituency will come up for renewal.  And they tend to want results over very short periods of time - three, four, five years.  But that is not realistic in terms of dealing with flooding.

We are also in an era of austerity and that is making it difficult to find the money to do some of the things that really do need doing.

Flood signs in Morpeth, Northumberland, UK. Photographer Ian Britton

In the longer term it makes sense, just as it does for climate change itself, and it makes sense to invest now to avert future costs.  The costs that emerging now in the latest research on flooding, the costs of flooding under different climate scenarios and different kinds of population growth, those costs are enormous.  We have to do something to avert them.  But that requires taking  quite difficult decisions now about how we spend limited budgets.  One understands the difficult choices politicians have to make both locally and nationally, but sometimes people have to grasp the nettle.

There are four types of flooding.  The most important - both in cost terms and the number of people at risk is undoubtedly from rivers. So the large rivers - the River Ouse in Yorkshire, the Severn, parts of the Thames above London - those are areas of some significance (and there are others).

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