Some of the UK’s coastal towns and villages may have to be relocated due to rising sea levels and erosion, the head of the Environment Agency will warn. Sir James Bevan will tell a flooding and coastal erosion conference that the “hardest of all inconvenient truths” is that “in the long term, climate change means that some of our communities – both in this country and around the world – cannot stay where they are”.
“That is because while we can come back safely and build back better after most river flooding, there is no coming back for land that coastal erosion has taken away or which a rising sea level has put permanently or frequently under water. Which means that in some places the right answer – in economic, strategic and human terms – will have to be to move communities away from danger rather than to try and protect them from the inevitable impacts of a rising sea level.”
Sir James, who has been chief executive of the Environment Agency since 2015, is set to say it is “far too early to say which communities are likely to need to move in due course, still less make any decisions”. He will tell the Flood and Coast Conference, in Telford, that “when we do eventually get to decisions on any relocation of communities, they must take full account of the views of the people who live there: no one should be forced from their homes against their will”.
