Flooding

Flood resilience 10 top tips

Learn more about our top 10 flood resilience tip to help prepare for and respond to flooding in the United Kingdom here.

As contributors to the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) Property Flood Resilience Code of Practice, we helped define best practice — allow us to help you become more flood resilient.
Despite COVID-19 we are still helping clients build flood resilience all over the UK, with surveys being scheduled for June onwards.

Our Approach

1. Know your flood risk hotspots and be on the front foot with insurers by using the same models to map and score your portfolio of assets.
2. Ahead of a claim, make your organisation and assets flood resilient today and under future climate changes.
3. When a claim happens, ensure the initial survey and schedule of works consider resilience, so that you "recover-resilient".
4. Test group or site Flood Emergency Response Plans (FERP) annually and, post-recovery, update them.

We can help you lessen the risk of a sizeable business interruption claim. This could help stabilise insurance pricing and availability to you, and open doors for new coverages, such as instant pay-out parametrics.

Our Process

With an eye on spending at this challenging time, our 5-step methodology helps ensure that you make the right flood resilience decisions each step of the way.

• Diagnostic: Profiling and prioritising what drives your flood risk today and under a 2 degree climate change warming scenario.
• Survey: For high-risk sites or for ongoing claims, carrying out a detailed flood resilience site survey that will recommend specific measures to guide your approach to resilience.
• Implement: Designing and building, re-fitting, or restoring assets in a resilient manner, plus an on-going Flood Emergency Response Plan (FERP).
• Insurance: Getting resilience measures recognised by your insurers and giving you additional options, such as parametric instant cover.
• Monitor: Knowing when to activate your FERP through our one-stop 24/7 intelligence feed of flood risk/status at each of your assets.

The good news: The cost of flood resilience services are often paid in part or whole by your insurer/bursary, because resilience is a sensible investment for everyone. We can explore this with you, whether or not Marsh is your current insurance broker.

Who are we?

Catastrophe Resilience Team, Marsh

We are part of the UK Government team that helped develop DEFRA’s new Property Flood Resilience Code of Practice that launched in February 2020 and we are working with other leaders in the field to urge all organisations that build, operate, maintain or invest in UK assets to address flood risk head on.

Our in-house team of engineers, surveyors, and adjusters are qualified flood resilience practitioners having completed and passed the BRE Property Flood Resilience training programme.

We were a founding member of DEFRA's roundtable on Property Flood Resilience, which in 2016 set out to make UK buildings and assets flood resilient. As the deputy Chair of the Data Working Group we work closely with Flood Re to ensure that the benefits of flood resilience are measurable and can be recognised by underwriters.  

Property Flood Resilience Code of Practice

DEFRA released its Property Flood Resilience Code of Practice in February 2020. Jointly authored by leading insurers, engineers, surveyors, planners, the Environment Agency, together with climate and property risk management experts, it provides world-leading, structured advice and guidance for organisations (and home owners) to make their assets flood resilient. Its standards should be applied from now on.

Download the Code of Practice

Our Excellent Partners

To deliver our service, our team proudly partner with the UK’s leading providers of flood modelling and flood risk and resilience surveys.

• JBA risk
• BRE
• RAB
• Flood Protection Solutions
• FloodFlash