Water-monitoring flying robots to help rapidly respond to accidents and improve management of water resources. The AquaMAV has sufficient battery capacity for 14 minutes of flight in air at 10m/s, which corresponds to a 5km range at which the robot can dive into water and return to base with a collected water sample.
Research Council: EPSRC
Financial protection against flood risk has been recognised a way to protect assets and livelihoods. However, concerns exist about the affordability of cover in high risk areas. Flood Re, a scheme were premiums are subsidised, were created to help households, but excludes micro-businesses, small businesses, charities and co-operatives in high-risk flood areas. The objective of this project is to improve our understanding of flood insurance for SMEs, and to establish if SMEs have flood insurance problems, and if so, how they could be overcome and which other risk management strategies could be available for SMEs. By doing so, the project will contribute to the development of a flood protection policy framework that increase the resilience of this backbone of the economy.
Research Council: ESRC
Understanding the situation of SMEs is important as they represent key drivers in achieving the growth and development needed for economic recovery. When SMEs experience direct damage, there is a knock-on effect on the local and regional economy, for example, damage such as access to public infrastructure, damage to their overall financial situation, stock and building maintenance. The most vulnerable sectors are retail and manufacturing firms.
UASs can be easily deployed – often hand launched – to assess damage across large areas, and provide emergency responders with the opportunity to assess situations quickly: this allows prioritisation of resources and effective deployment. One aspect of the research focuses on addressing challenges in flying UASs in non-ideal situations, for example, maintaining performance during adverse weather conditions, during intermittent loss of communication with the base station, overcoming the loss of operator visuals, providing the ability to recover the vehicle without a runway and avoiding potential collisions with unexpected obstacles.
Research Council: EPSRC
SMEs often become ‘experts through experience’; this study focused on the effects of flooding on a single village street, case studies including the negative impacts like loss of customers, damage to stock and electrical equipment. Many resilience measures can be taken to be better prepared for future floods, such as moving critical storage items upstairs, raising levels of electrical sockets, and having plans to evacuate stock and vulnerable equipment
Research Council: EPSRC
The essential upgrading required by existing UK infrastructure rates poorly compared to that of other advanced economies (HM Government, 2017). Poor infrastructure affects the productivity and competitiveness of businesses and industries, and increases the risks of adverse economic and social impacts due to extreme weather events, such as flooding. This project will develop the economic case for investing in resilient urban infrastructure at a city scale, exploring the synergies between disaster risk reduction and improvements in productivity, economic growth, employment, environmental quality, and human well-being. It will focus on the Leeds city area, which has been affected by extreme flooding in the past, seeking to draw lessons that can be applied more broadly to other cities in the UK and abroad.
Research Council: ESRC
Flooding has the potential to have significant impact on the value of properties depending on the level of inherent vulnerability. Experts argue that it is not the actual risk but the perception of risk among property holders that influences vulnerability of value.
Research Council: Other