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For many years, the UK government – and governments around the world – have been grappling with the effects of climate change. While not unique to the UK, last year we recorded the hottest day on record with temperatures soaring to 40°C in some parts of the country.
It’s not just increasing temperatures that are concerning people, however. Flash floods and extreme weather patterns are hammering the UK’s coastline and in turn, our coastal defences have started to erode.
Peter Mumford is managing director of Balfour Beatty UK Construction Regional Civils
Balfour Beatty has been delivering coastal protection and flood defence schemes for over 25 years. We have a long and successful history working with local authorities, having completed Wyre Council’s Rossall flood defence scheme – in partnership with the Environment Agency – in 2018 and most recently, having been appointed to deliver two coastal defence projects on behalf of Denbighshire County Council.
But while the traditional approach to delivering coastal protection works will continue to play a key role in shoring up the UK’s coastline, we need to adapt with agility and re-think how we combat extreme and unpredictable weather conditions. We must be ready when emergencies strike.
Enter our climate resilience offering – our new approach to delivering flood and coastal protection works.
Our climate resilience offering capitalises on our civil engineering expertise and our experience in working with nature, to protect homes and businesses along our coast whilst also creating opportunities to enhance biodiversity and habitats, invest in local communities and provide jobs for local people.
At the heart of our climate resilience offering is collaboration. Collaboration with our long-standing customers allows us to be on the front foot and act quickly to put in place measures that will protect hundreds – if not thousands – of homes and businesses across the length and breadth of the UK from the risk of flooding and coastal erosion.
What does this mean in practice? By working closely with local authorities, we are able to stockpile essential materials such as rock armour and rock underlayer, so that our teams can mobilise quickly and deliver required works efficiently. It means that we don’t have to spend valuable time sourcing these materials from quarries and run the risk of deliveries being delayed.
We are already working with multiple customers to identify areas where we can safely store such materials so we’re ready to act at crunch time. It pays to invest time in building these relationships and maintaining them over the long term.
As well as protecting our coastline, we are also increasingly helping clients with nationally important assets inland such as roads and power infrastructure that increasingly need new ways to be protected from extreme weather events.
Frameworks such as the SCAPE Civil Engineering framework and the Coastal Partnership East, also give customers unique access to our team of unrivalled experts – they know that we can deliver and are up to the job.
Critically, these frameworks also enable early contractor involvement which helps us to implement innovative technologies and solutions from the outset, to standardise specifications and undertake schemes simultaneously whilst also allowing for shared resources and ensuring effective reuse of materials.
You might have heard about the emergency coastal defence project at Hemsby in Norfolk. This is a key example of our climate resilience expertise in action. The beach had to be closed when high tides claimed metres of sand and rapid erosion also threatened a collapse to the single access road leading to a number of nearby properties.
Through the Coastal Partnership East framework, we were called in to help. We delivered an 80m temporary rock revetment, made out of nearly 2,000t of rock, in record time. The engineered structure takes the power out of the wave energy as it comes in and also catches material that could cause further erosion.
After just a few days, we could already see sand being caught within the revetment itself, showing that the temporary solution was doing its job and buying time for the community and authorities to secure a more permanent defence further down the line.
It is situations like this that make a change in approach so fundamental. Our climate resilience offering means that we can play our part in ensuring the UK has the critical infrastructure it needs today and tomorrow, as extreme weather patterns continue.
And through our climate resilience offering, Balfour Beatty will be ready to deliver.
- Peter Mumford is managing director of Balfour Beatty UK Construction Regional Civils
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