At the Flood & Coast conference 2026, Environment Agency Chief Executive Philip Duffy spoke about climate challenges and what they mean for those working in flooding, the new approach to delivering flood defences and how we need to work together to build systems and capability to deliver on the ambitions the country has for flood defence in the years ahead. In this blog post, he focuses on the main points of the speech.
I've been at the Environment Agency for three years, and during that time the UK, in common with many places around the world, has experienced some decidedly unusual weather.
In January 2024, we were hit by Storm Henk. The Avon, the Thames, the Trent, and the Severn were all exceeding record levels in the same week. In September 2024, the East Midlands had 300% of its long-term rainfall. In the northwest of England, the total rainfall on New Year's Day 2025 was 90 millimetres, recorded at Denton. That's the kind of rainfall that would not embarrass a tropical island, and to experience that here in England's northwest in January tells you just how fast the scale of the challenge is changing. On that day, the Mersey was an incredible 3.2 metres above its record ever level at Brinksway.
It isn't just the rain that's breaking records month after month. We've just recorded the highest ever temperatures consecutively in May in England at 35.1 degrees centigrade.
All of that only really illustrates what the scientists are saying unequivocally about the state of our nation's climate: our weather is becoming more volatile, it's becoming more extreme. And we can see a pattern occurring — wetter winters, hotter and drier summers, and when the rain comes, heavier and more destructive rainfall.
That volatility brings real-world consequences: rising flood risk in communities, disruption to infrastructure and to agriculture, and growing pressure on the systems we rely upon every day. And perhaps the hardest thing for people like me trying to communicate these risks is that the changes we are already seeing are only the start, with a great deal more to come.
Assessing future flood risk
Last year was a milestone for the Environment Agency in that we published our latest national flood risk assessment — NAFRA 2. It enabled us to use more up-to-date climate science to quantify flood risk down to two square metres right across England. It shows that 6.3 million houses in England are already at risk of flooding, and that will rise to 8 million by the middle of the century. The biggest element of that risk is not rivers, and it is not the coast. It is sudden surface water flooding caused by summer downpours. And those risks apply in places where people do not know that they're at risk and where they don't necessarily know what to do should that risk materialise.
It's not just about homes. 59% of our grade 1 agricultural land across England is at risk of flooding. Around half our rail network is at flood risk and a third of our road network, and the economic consequences for us of not taking that seriously could be extremely severe in the years ahead.
How are flood defences changing?
So that shift in risk, that move to a different form of climate risk and a different form of flood risk, means we need different responses as a country. Last year, following the spending review, the Treasury committed £7.9 billion to a 10-year pipeline of capital investment to maintain existing defences and invest in new defences, nature-based solutions, and property-level flood resilience. Our aim in that investment is to protect a further 840,000 homes by 2035–36.
Since 2015, 455,000 homes across England have had improved flood defences, thanks to the work of not just the EA, but many other authorities, and 62,000 of those improvements were in the last two years.
Much of the money committed will go on new defences, and we have major schemes in preparation, notably along the Thames, which has the largest undefended floodplain in Europe, but also the completion of existing in-flight schemes like the Bridgewater Barrier.
The new funding policy from Defra makes our approach much broader than just new defences. It allows us to do greater reconditioning and replacement of existing defences which are life-expired.
Warning and informing
We do sadly have to recognise that flooding will remain a real problem for many communities in the years ahead. That is why warning, informing, and resilience are just as important a part of our response as building defences. Last year, the Environment Agency issued 3,000 flood alerts and 900 of the more severe flood warnings. We have 1.54 million people signed up to our new, completely free, flood warning system. And we're spending £2.9 million in the coming year to complete improvements in our modelling to make sure we're keeping up with changes in climate and rainfall.
But to warn is only half the issue. Communities need clear, actionable information, practical support, and confidence, if they're to recover from flooding rapidly. Property Flood Resilience is one tool we can use to help this, helping individuals and communities adapt their properties to recover more quickly. In Devon, the EA now has new forecasting systems which give earlier warning of surface water flooding.
Water as a single system
The more I spend time thinking about flooding and water quality and pollution, the more convinced I've become that you've got to think about water as a single system, particularly at the catchment level. Key to that will be a shift towards more regional systems planning, thinking about how water planning, catchment management, and investment come together at a regional tier to deliver fantastic outcomes.
We are not passive observers of what's going on either in our climate or our communities. We have the power and influence to make that difference — and if we can work together, from the voluntary sector, from the supply chain, from the public authorities, from the regulators, and from our colleagues in government, we really can make an enormous difference.
seen at 18:42, 20 July in Environment Agency: For homes and habitats..