What is Flood Action Week?
Flood Action Week is an annual campaign led by the Environment Agency, encouraging people, businesses and communities to understand their flood risk and take practical steps to prepare for flooding.
Taking place from 12–18 October 2026, this year’s campaign is an important reminder that flood resilience isn’t simply about responding when severe weather arrives. It’s about the work undertaken beforehand to understand risk, prepare communities and reduce the potential impact of flooding.
For local authorities, that responsibility extends well beyond individual properties or drainage assets. It involves understanding the infrastructure and places that communities depend on, how flooding can affect them and where action can make the greatest difference.
Flood risk goes beyond individual assets
According to the Environment Agency’s latest National Flood Risk Assessment, 6.3 million properties in England are in areas at risk of flooding from rivers, the sea or surface water. By the middle of the century, that figure could rise to around 8 million.
But properties are only part of the picture. Roads, bridges, drainage networks, schools, healthcare facilities and other essential infrastructure all play a role in how communities experience flooding.
A flooded road can prevent someone getting to work, interrupt access to healthcare or restrict emergency services. A blocked culvert can affect properties and infrastructure well beyond its immediate location. Understanding these relationships is fundamental to understanding the wider consequences of flooding, and why managing flood risk cannot simply be a case of maintaining individual assets in isolation.
Understanding where intervention makes a difference
For local authorities, resources are finite. Maintaining every drainage asset at the same frequency, regardless of its condition, location or consequences of failure, isn’t necessarily the most effective way to reduce flood risk.
Effective preparedness requires a more informed approach. That means understanding the assets across a network, how water moves through and around them, their condition and performance, and the wider risks associated with their location. It also means looking at previous flooding, changing weather patterns, surrounding land use and the communities that could be affected.
Bringing this information together helps authorities identify where intervention is most needed, prioritise resources and make better-informed decisions about maintenance and investment. Sometimes that will mean more frequent maintenance. Sometimes it will mean investigating a wider drainage problem, improving infrastructure or recognising that an individual asset isn’t the cause of the flooding being experienced.
The important distinction is understanding the problem before deciding on the intervention.
Connecting infrastructure risk with community impact
Knowing where flooding might occur is only part of effective flood resilience. We also need to understand what happens when it does.
Two locations with similar flood risk may have very different consequences depending on the roads, properties, services and communities affected. A relatively small flooding incident on a critical access route could have a disproportionate impact on a community. Similarly, repeated flooding in a residential area can have consequences that go far beyond the immediate physical damage, affecting people’s wellbeing, confidence and ability to recover.
Understanding these wider impacts helps authorities make decisions based not simply on the likelihood of flooding, but on its potential consequences. It also supports clearer conversations with communities about why particular locations are prioritised and what can realistically be done to manage risk.
Preparedness also means helping communities understand
There is another important part of flood resilience that can sometimes be overlooked: the relationship between what authorities know and what communities understand.
Residents understandably want action when flooding occurs. Often, the most visible drainage asset is the gully outside their home, so it’s natural to associate flooding with whether that gully has been cleaned. But flooding can be influenced by a much wider range of factors, including rainfall intensity, ground conditions, watercourses, downstream capacity and the design of surrounding infrastructure.
Cleaning a gully may be the right intervention. In other circumstances, it may make little difference. Helping communities understand these distinctions matters because it supports more informed reporting, more realistic expectations and better conversations about the measures available to manage flood risk.
Elected members also have an important role in connecting local authority knowledge with the communities they represent, helping residents understand local risks, the decisions being made and the practical steps they can take. This isn’t about transferring responsibility to communities, but ensuring people have the information and understanding to play an informed role in their own preparedness.
Building resilience before the storm
Flood resilience isn’t achieved through one intervention, one organisation or one part of a drainage network. It requires a connected understanding of infrastructure, water, risk and the places and communities affected.
That means bringing together operational teams, flood risk specialists, highways authorities, elected members, partners and communities, supported by evidence that can inform decisions before, during and after flooding.
At KaarbonTech, this is central to our role as the Resilience Partner for Local Authorities. We work with authorities to build a clearer understanding of their networks, identify and prioritise risk, support better planning and operational decisions, and connect that evidence with the wider outcomes for the communities they serve.
Because effective flood resilience isn’t simply about responding when something goes wrong. It’s about understanding what could happen, who could be affected and what we can do about it before the storm arrives.