Devon Resilience Innovation Programme (DRIP)

Improving flood resilience across Devon

There are many steep-sided hills across Devon, where water travels quickly downhill during intense rainfall events, due to the soil type and land management. This can cause flash flooding ot the surrounding farms, villages and towns. Climate change predictions suggest the UK will experience more intense and frequent rainfall events, alongside drier summers in the south, putting pressure on water availability.

This project aims to reduce the impact of flooding to communities across Devon through a combination of interventions to improve flood and drought resilience.

Project aims

When it rains in steep-sided catchments, communities often only have a few hours to activate their flood plan and deploy property flood resilience measures. The project aims to provide more time for communities to be ready by:

• helping communities to identify flood risk issues, develop emergency plans and be ready to activate them
• slowing the flow of water and storing water in the river catchment through natural flood management measures
• providing localised flood forecasting alerts and other smart technologies to the community to improve preparation time for flood events
• protecting community assets such as village halls and local shops to provide communities with shelter and resources during flood events

We are testing innovative approaches (in combination) to reduce the effects of flooding. These approaches fall into four main categories:

• Community preparedness and support
• Natural Flood Management (NFM)
• Smart technologies
• Flood resilience measures for community assets

See our website: www.devon.gov.uk/drip for more information on these pilot projects and the communities we are working in.

Follow us on social media for regular project updates! @devonfloodresilience on Instagram and Facebook.

How you can get involved

The communities we are working with have been selected, but if you want to find out more please drop us an email at floodrisk@devon.gov.uk

Our partner organisations:

The communities we are working in: