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About BeFloodReady

BeFloodReady provides guidance and information on Property Flood Resilience (PFR), helping homes, businesses and communities to BeFloodReady.

Historically, flooding and coastal change has had a significant impact on homes, businesses and communities across the UK. As a result of climate change, we are already seeing evidence of more frequent and more extreme flood events. We cannot eliminate the risk of flooding entirely, but we can use a range of tools to reduce the impacts of flooding on homes and businesses.

Increasingly, Property Flood Resilience (PFR) is being used across the UK to manage the risk of flooding and mitigate its impacts.

BeFloodReady is your local source of information and guidance on Property Flood Resilience (PFR) and how you can BeFloodReady.

Aerial photo of a river through British countryside and a town in the distance

How flood risk management
is evolving

In many places at flood risk across the UK, large, engineered flood defence schemes are the main way that flood risk to properties and businesses is managed and reduced. However, for a variety of reasons, this type of flood risk management scheme is not always viable for every situation. Sometimes these schemes aren’t technically suitable, or they are found not to be cost effective. This often leaves communities reliant on largely ineffective sandbags.

There are now other innovative and cost-effective products that can be used to manage flood risk at each individual property. This is called Property Flood Resilience, or PFR for short. PFR provides the opportunity for homes, businesses and communities to adapt, prepare and respond to changing flood risk.
Find out more about Property Flood Resilience

The Flood
Protection Hierarchy

The flood resilience hierarchy shows how PFR bridges the gap between traditional flood defence schemes and ineffective sandbags.
Flood Protection Hierarchy Triangle

Supporting communities
at flood risk

The Flood Resilience Pathfinders, funded by Defra, ran between 2019 and 2021, with the aim of increasing awareness around Property Flood Resilience (PFR) in the UK. The Pathfinders aimed to support communities at flood risk by providing information and guidance, enhancing the future uptake of PFR as a key part of flood risk management. The BeFloodReady website was initially developed as part of the South West PFR Pathfinder.

Winner - 2022 Flood and Coast Excellence Award for Climate Resilient Places

The CIWEM* Flood and Coast Excellence Award for Climate Resilient Places recognises projects and programmes that improve place-based resilience to the future impacts of extreme weather on communities, infrastructure, and assets. The award identifies the very best of flood and coastal erosion risk management nationally.

Winning this prestigious industry-leading national award acknowledged the incredible work of the DEFRA funded and Environment Agency supported PFR Pathfinder Programme to identify the barriers to the uptake and delivery of PFR, and to provide a range of innovative solutions to address this to provide individuals, businesses, and communities with greater awareness of their flood risk. BeFloodReady is one of these solutions.

* CIWEM – Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management.

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For help and guidance on local flood risk management and to access support, please get in touch with your local council.
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