Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink

Pregnant women being plucked out of top-floor windows and helicoptered to safety. Reservoir walls being propped up to prevent catastrophic collapse . Hundreds of cars stuck on a motorway which had turned into a river. And canoes sailing down the High Street.

From Hull and Tewkesbury and Sheffield and many more they came, pictures that were to offer the definitive scenes of what, even by British standards, has been a terrible so-called summer. Instead of recalling afternoons spent lying on a beach, for many in these towns the summer of 2007 will be remembered for nights spent in emergency shelters while the rising waters swallowed up their prized possessions.

The damage caused is expected to run to billions of pounds, and the financial figure doesn't begin to take into account the feeling of personal loss of property and the invasion into everyday life.

As ever when there's a major emergency situation, the usual urgent questions were soon being asked - is this the result of climate change? What can be done? Why do we have to put up with this?

Those are questions which academics and students at Dundee have been addressing for some time, with a whole group of researchers based throughout the College of Arts and Social Sciences, mainly in Geography and the UNESCO Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science, engaged in tackling the risks, causes and effects of flooding.

Dr Andrew Black, in Geography, is one of those researchers. He is in no doubt as to the major cause of floods which have brought grief time and again over decades.

"This is a problem which has been created - it is a human problem," he said. "We historically chose to settle on flood plains, we wanted to be close to rivers which were attractive places to live and which offered a means of living and trading. The problem is that these attractive places can come back to bite us and that is what we have seen time and again, most recently this summer in England. Floods never recur with regularity, so sometimes people can be lulled into a false sense of security."

"If you look at some place like Hull, a large area of the city lies below sea level and near water, so it isn't entirely surprising that it floods."

"The worrying thing is that to some extent we haven't learned all the lessons we should from incidents like this, or if we have we haven't applied them."

"There are still houses being built on areas which are at risk of flooding, as an example you can look at the massive house-building programme in the Thames Gateway, which is at risk of coastal flooding, albeit a low risk."

The floods this summer have been spread mainly across the English midlands but in Scotland we are no strangers to the dangers of rivers bursting their banks or tides rising over defences. But Andrew feels we have at least taken on board some of the lessons learned from major events of relatively recent history.

"There was a significant change in Scotland following the floods in Perth in 1993, when the Tay rose to extremely high levels and flooded around 400 houses, and in Strathclyde in 1994, when flood waters knocked out the low-level rail routes, filled the SECC and turned Ferguslie Park into a lake."

"The Scottish Executive has been more ambitious than perhaps any other country in Europe in legislating to promote sustainable flood management. That has created a number of initiatives which people like Alan Werritty, Rob Duck, Tom Ball, Donald Houston, Amy Tavendale and myself, all based here at Dundee, have been heavily involved in."

"These are initiatives which have worked to outline the definitions of sustainable flood management, to assess flood risk, to develop strategies for coastal risk management, to engage with all the relevant bodies from the environment agencies to local authorities to the insurance industry, to tackle flood-related issues on a regional basis. At an international scale, Alan Werritty has just been appointed to an UN Expert Panel, while closer to home Tom Ball is working with UK environment agencies to help develop methods for increasing the roll-out of flood warning services."

"All this work has had a positive effect in Scotland, where we have carried out a lot of research into risk of flooding, the after-effects of flooding, and many more areas of concern around this issue, much of it supported and sponsored by the Executive."

"This has led to good, positive developments, not least within the insurance industry where insurers have been able to offer less stringent terms to householders on flood plains because of the actions taken by the Executive and bodies like ourselves. But nothing stands still, and I'm very much looking forward to working with the Executive directly over the next few months as they prepare to draft new legislation to transpose the EU Flooding Directive into Scots Law."

For all that, he knows that we shouldn't expect for a minute that there won't be more trouble in future.

"We're not perfect. There is still a lot of action that is reactive rather than proactive. Even if you look at Perth, it took ten years after 1993 to complete the flood defence programme, despite there being a long history of flooding there. Then there are all the flood-threatened communities where no steps are yet being made to begin reducing risk"

There is also the delicate balancing act of measuring the risk of flood against commercial interest. Developers and planners can still be prepared to effectively gamble on whether at-risk areas will escape the effects of floods.

"Guidelines in this country on where you can build and what you can build have been tightened in relation to flood risk assessment in recent years, but those still come up against severe pressures when, for instance, developers come looking to build a major project. In that kind of situation local authorities face very difficult decisions, as they may be turning away a development that could prove fairly lucrative for the local area. The evidence we are still receiving suggests that the development pressures still win out in many cases, so things are not perfect."

"There are also still large areas of unprotected property. The problem with these kind of things is that the people who take the risks aren't those who have to bear the consequences if it goes wrong."

The research work being carried out by Andrew and colleagues is helping battle the tide and offer insights into how we can manage floods and adapt to the risk. There is also a steady stream of graduates being produced by the University who are going on to staff the environmental agencies, consultancies and other authorities dealing with water issues.

"It perhaps isn't surprising that there is a real demand for graduates in the relevant disciplines to this, and we are producing a lot of them at Dundee. That demand will only rise as we see more hydrological events, whether it be floods or droughts, as we surely will."

"We are still some way from having a situation where people can make well-informed decisions relating to flood risk, but we are getting closer, particularly in Scotland," he said. "The number or the severity of floods may get worse in our lifetimes, but equally through the work we are doing we will hopefully adapt better to the problem."

"There is no sign that we are going to demolish entire cities which lie on flood plains, so adapt is what we have got to do, and to do that we must be armed with the knowledge of what causes these floods, why they happen, and what we can do."