Disaster Prevention and Management

Purpose – There is a need to proactively address strategic weaknesses in protecting the built environment from a range of hazards. This paper seeks to focus on the mitigation for flood hazards in the UK; particularly in understanding the extent of the problem, collating key guidance and legislation related to flood hazard mitigation, identifying who the key construction decision makers are and the most opportune stages of the Design-Construction-Operation Process when they need to make their key decisions.

Design/methodology/approach – A pluralistic research design was adopted for the study, which included a UK-wide questionnaire survey and a set of semi-structured interviews involving a range of professionals from construction, planning, insurance, emergency management and local/national government agencies was undertaken.

Findings – Despite the publication of a range of guidance on flood hazard mitigation in the UK there is still insufficient evidence that key construction stakeholders are playing an active role in mitigating flood risk. The pre-construction phase of a building's life cycle is identified as is the most critical stage when key stakeholders need to adopt flood hazard mitigation strategies. The socio-institutional constraints to the proactive attainment of built-in resilience are highlighted as are recommendations as to how these constraints can be addressed.

Research limitations/implications – The paper reports on the provisional findings of an ongoing project but these findings nonetheless provide essential foundations for the latter development of the PRE-EMPT toolkit and also raise some important considerations about flood resilience in the UK.

Originality/value – The findings presented reveal how stakeholders should be better involved, and what issues they need to address, regarding the integration of built-in resilience into construction decision making.