About the UK Flood Impact Map
This map is one of the outputs of a project ClimateNode conducted in collaboration with the think tank Bright Blue to collate information on the impacts of flooding and related hazards in the UK since 2007 from newspaper articles. The project used natural language processing to extract relevant information from approximately 7,800 articles from over 60 local, regional and national news sites.
Click on the map markers to reveal pop-ups containing summaries and links to relevant articles for individual places. Use the checkboxes to explore sectors, individual flood events and recurring themes. The map is accompanied by a report which presents the findings and discusses policy implications.
Coordinates have been derived via a geocoder using OpenStreetMap data.
Interpreting the map
The map provides links to articles relating to flood events within the time frame 2007-21. When a pop-up says “this place has experienced flooding” it means within this time frame.
Pop-ups present information about the place mentioned in the header (which may be a building, street or a whole city), not about the precise coordinates of the marker.
Most pop-ups on the map provide brief, formulaic summaries of what has happened in each location, but it is recommended users look at the linked articles for full information. Information in the summaries is only as accurate as the information in the articles.
Flooding is a complex phenomenon, and the evolution of flood risk over time in any particular location will be influenced by a range of factors, such as upstream land management, urbanisation and construction of flood defences – as well as changes in rainfall related to climate change. The map does not include information on whether flood events were made more likely or severe by climate change, which was well beyond the scope of the project. Inclusion of a place on the map simply means there is information about flooding relating to that place.
It has been possible to analyse only a sample of newspaper stories about flooding in the UK, and impossible to do justice to every affected community’s story. Apologies to any user who finds their community’s story is not included.
In some cases, a place may be referred to in a photo essay rather than the main text of an article, and users may need to click through a set of photos to discover information about the place mentioned.