An interesting campaign to tackle low birth rates in Denmark, which could well have been an April Fool's joke given the date...
Called Do it for Denmark, it is being organised by a travel company in Denmark, and those who participate in the scheme have a chance to earn prizes if they can prove that they conceived a baby while on holiday with the firm.
An interesting one for pro-natal population policies.
One of the things about being a prolific blogger is that things you write disappear off the main section of the blog quite quickly.
I thought it was worth reminding you of something that I created a while back with the guy on the left here...
Good GCSE teaching needs good up to date case studies, and the current flooding affecting large parts of the country is perfect for that - although its misery for those caught up in it...
This is an excellent resource for the current times, when we have COBRA meetings (bonus points for those who tell me why they are called that)
The Conversation offers a perspective on news stories, and would be a useful resource for geographers preparing for GCSE exams.
Ministers should be applauded for recognising that there’s simply no way we could tell the thousands of key workers and low income families, desperate for a decent home, that we can’t build any more new homes because of concerns about flood plains.
David Orr, National Housing Federation, BBC News, 2007.
For the past six weeks, Somerset has experienced its most significant flooding in decades that have at last required calling out the army.
While commentators fixate on dredging rivers, or more sustainably planting trees, or reintroducing beavers as the solution to prevent more homes from being flooded, those with longer memories may cast them back to 2007, when much of central and southwestern England was underwater from some of the worst flooding in living memory.
Communities Minister Eric Pickles might like to consider the inconvenient truth of his own words in 2007 while in opposition. Following the floods, he said in response to Labour’s housing strategy that: “if you build houses on flood plains it increases the likelihood that people will be flooded”.
A flood of water and bad ideas
As the still-beleaguered residents of the Somerset levels will recall, the floods of 2007 followed the wettest May, June and July since records began in 1766. The airwaves and newspapers were similarly awash with opinion in response to the government’s ambitious plans to build 3m new homes by 2020. Inevitably, it was said, so long as the proper defences were in place, some of these new homes would be built on floodplains.
The cost of 2007’s wettest-ever summer: 7,000 businesses and 48,000 homes were flooded in the South West, Midlands, Yorkshire and Humberside, prompting 120,000 household insurance claims, 27,000 commercial claims at a £3bn overall cost to insurers.
The subsequent inquiry led by Sir Michael Pitt published its review the following summer. It found that around 10% of properties in England were located on floodplains, with 11% of new homes since 2000 built in flood hazard areas, and 16,000 dwellings since 2006 built in high flood risk areas. Roughly a quarter of properties flooded in summer 2007 had been built in the last 25 years. This, the review pointed out, emphasised the vital importance of strong planning controls and well-informed planning decisions.
Sandbags do not a flood defence make. Tim Ireland/PA
Realising there needed to be a balance between development needs and flood risk, the idea of “environmental limits” was discussed within Defra. In putting “the green back into the Green Belt” as then environment secretary David Miliband said, this stressed the importance of the ecosystems approach.
For example, planting urban woodland improves biodiversity and wildlife, provides a degree of flood control, renewable wood to offset climate change, and attractive environments for exercise and recreation. Strips of planted green space alongside city river banks are cheaper than expensive concrete barriers, and provide a fall-back area, a “turquoise belt”, that could be flooded without great risk or expense, and also provide for leisure and biodiversity at the same time.
Recommendations made
Of the 90 recommendations in Pitt’s review, two clearly stated there should be a presumption against building in high risk areas. This was in accordance with the government’s planning policy on flood risk, known as PPS25.
The review also called for the effectiveness of PPS25 and the Environment Agency’s powers to challenge development to be kept under review, and strengthened if necessary. Another recommendation stated that Defra, the Environment Agency, and Natural England should establish through Catchment Flood Management Plans a programme that would find a way of working with, rather than against, natural processes.
These approaches, which included setting back river defences and relocating buildings if necessary, were considered particularly important in the face of the predicted increase in river flow levels. Flood risk had to be managed co-operatively between local authorities, the Environment Agency and developers, in a more sustainable way and also as a means to provide more attractive places to live. Newspaper editorials at the time called for there to be “no backsliding on commitments to be better prepared in future” and that there should be “no cherry-picking of the Pitt recommendations for quick political gain in the run-up to a general election.
Flood Risk Management - A Little More Complex Than Dredging. Tim Ireland
Recommendations ignored
But a general election later, in 2012 prime minister David Cameron is pledging to “cut through the dither” that is holding Britain in “paralysis” and has brought forward by contentious measures to relax rules on planning applications with an eye to boosting growth, and providing 75,000 new homes. The National Planning Policy Framework is proclaimed “simple”, and had reduced planning policy from more than 1,000 pages to under 100, said to pave the way for swifter, clearer decisions.
Otto Thoresen, director-general of the The Association of British Insurers, expressed immediate concern that the framework could lead to greater inappropriate development in flood risk areas, something that the current “rigorous planning system” was a bulwark against. The result, he predicted, would not be the “stimulation of the economy,” but “misery for people when their homes are flooded”.
The National Flood Forum’s chairman, Charles Tucker, similarly argued that the new framework “has, at a stroke, scrapped the carefully constructed raft of technical guidance, context and definitions built up over years” for flood protection.
Dredging as a solution was raised following the Cumbria floods of 2009, to which Professor Colin Thorne, fluvial geomorphologist at the University of Nottingham, responded that floods caused by a huge amounts of rainfall cannot be entirely prevented. Constantly dredging rivers and clearing vegetation to do so would be unsustainably expensive, financially, socially and in terms of biodiversity and habitat loss.
It is clear to see, reflecting back on the floods of 2007 (and those in 2005 and 2009), the lack of integration and disjointed policy across the two central government departments has still not been resolved seven years later. The fixation with dredging continues, and David Cameron has called for dredging to start as soon as possible, reversing previous statements that it would be little help.
Perhaps instead if the media turned their attention to dredging the Defra archives, they’d find the “inconvenient truth” of floodplain development – that houses built on floodplains could flood – a truth currently lying buried in the sediments of their own filing cabinets. Karen Potter receives funding from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), Welsh Government and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.
I spent Thursday of this week on the first part of a journey around the coast of Norfolk from Wells next the Sea, visiting some of the communities that were affected by the recent storm surge. The surge affected communities much further up the coast in Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire, then down into the Thames estuary.
I will be writing up some of the discussions that I had with people and the stories that I collected in further posts over the next week or so.
Beach Road in Happisburgh is shorter than it was the last time I visited, and the resources I used then will need to be updated.
The full detail, and more images, will appear in a range of resources, including a new GCSE textbook. Here's a selection of the images I took yesterday...
I was also particularly interested in this image, which shows the area of London that would have flooded in the surge if the Thames Flood Barrier had not been built.
Image copyright: Environment Agency
The Environment Agency has shared a range of valuable information, and I will be adding to that in further posts...
I'm a fan of the idea of taking a historical event, and bringing it back to life by tweeting (in real time if possible) the events that happened, and adding in images and other information to bring the event to life again...
I've mentioned Twitter and its use in the Badger book... including as a tool for revision purposes.
Thanks to Tania Grigg for the tipoff to a live-tweeting event happening to retell the story of the expedition to conquer Mount Everest in 1953....
Follow the Twitter feed... or the hashtag #Everest53
What events / anniversaries are coming up that could be re-enacted ??
How about 33 years after Harry Truman tweeted... "Feeding the cats... mighty quiet here..."
One of the challenges for GCSE teachers is to keep case studies up to date.
The ARAL SEA remains one of the most important examples of the consequences of a mis-management of a resource by humans.
This Al Jazeera English video is a good example of one source of additional information on this area, which is obviously continuing to develop and change over time. It's important to follow up case studies which might be featured in text books, particularly as the publication date gets further and further away from the present day....
Al Jazeera often focus on topics that are familiar to UK students, but sometimes approach them from a slightly different angle.
Of course whichever case studies you use, or specification you have selected, the Badger book provides a range of ideas for making the most of them.
A longer Al Jazeera programme, on the 'People of the Lake' is here, although there's a lot of subtitle reading to do... Would this be a video that you would use ?
If you were using it, how could it be made more 'accessible' for learners ?
Do we want to do all the work for the students ??
One of the sections in the book refers to the importance of timing when teaching GCSE topics.
As we are currently in Hurricane Season, and the news today was discussing Hurricane Isaac, perhaps the start of the new school year could be a chance to focus on Extreme Weather or Natural Hazards - or the relevant section of the (hopefully accredited) specification that you are teaching.
Check the ESRI Hurricane and Cyclone disaster map, which is constantly updated, and is currently showing the track of Isaac and associated media...
Don't forget that you can also add a WEATHER layer to Google Earth...
Isaac is over two hundred miles wide at present, and travelling at around 10 miles an hour towards New Orleans.... Perhaps a chance to compare with Hurricane Katrina...
The day of the Olympics opening was also the date when a new website was launched offering opportunities for fieldwork in the East end of London, associated with the Olympics Park and the associated regeneration....
A number of familiar names offer a range of options for visiting teachers and students, and at reasonable prices too...
Having accompanied John Widdowson with a full day visit by a school group a few months before the start of the games, I can vouch for the quality of the experience, and the associated materials. The teachers I accompanied felt that this would give their students an advantage when it came to the GCSE examination, as they had had personal experience of key locations.
There are plenty of important themes covered in GCSE Specifications which are covered by a day in the East End of London... These would include sustainability, urban change and regeneration, tourism, environmental change, urbanisation and inequality.
This is an excellent resource for the current times, when we have COBRA meetings (bonus points for those who tell me why they are called that)
