Humber in a Box | GeoSkinner

As I write this, it is currently Trustees Week in the UK – 6^th to the 10^th of November 2023. Trustees are at the heart of all charities. They are a special type of volunteer who provide leadership to the charity, making sure it fulfils its (legal) purpose and ensuring its volunteers and members have the support they need. This role is called governance.

To date, I have over five years of experience serving as a trustee for different charities. These roles are among the most rewarding things I have done in my career. They also provided me experiences of leadership, collaboration, and communication when I was an early-career researcher, and these have equipped me well for the challenges of my career. I have found new colleagues, new collaborations, and friends for life.

In 2015, I started volunteering as the Press Officer for the British Society for Geomorphology (BSG). This was a non-trustee position, helping the sub-committee for Outreach and Education by maintaining the Society’s social media channels and dealing with press enquiries. I was just two years out from my PhD at this point and it was good exposure to the world of professional societies, which are often small charities. I also had the opportunity to do some exciting things, like supporting a BSG exhibit at Cheltenham Science Festival with my Humber in a Box virtual reality experience.

In 2018, I stood for election for Vice-Chair of the Outreach and Education sub-committee of the BSG, to succeed my friend Annie Ockelford (difficult shoes to fill). This was a trustee position and I was elected by the BSG’s membership for a three-year term. For those three years I ran the sub-committee alongside another trustee, firstly Louise Slater and followed by Hannah Williams. The Outreach and Education sub-committee existed to promote geomorphology, careers in it, and its value to society to the public and all levels of education. Some of the core tasks were:

Maintaining relationships with partner organisations, including the Royal Geographical Society and the Geographical Association.
Issuing outreach grant awards to members.
Judging the Marjorie Sweeting Award for best undergraduate dissertation in geomorphology.

Much of my time in this role was affected by the Covid pandemic and resultant lockdowns. But problems present opportunities. The lack of travel saved the Society a lot of money and it needed to spend it (the Charity Commission does not like you building up excessive reserves), so I designed and ran a grant award for digital outreach and educational tools. From my own experience, outreach and science communication grants are usually small (often < £1k) and this means you can not achieve a lot. I was keen to provide something with a bigger budget and see what could be achieved. This enabled us to fund some amazing projects and create some amazing tools for geomorphologists to use:

Steddfod Amgen 2021 Virtual Field trips (example).
New developments of Virtual Glaciers (video).
Tayside through Time (video).
Coastal Explorers (video).

The Digital Resource Series was rounded off with a knowledge sharing workshop, with expert contributions from Bethan Davies, Leah Forsythe, and Chloe Leach. These recorded presentations are still freely available to anyone and I look back with pride at the knowledge we were able to capture and share through this grant call. Check out the videos, they are inspiring.

It was also in this role that I developed a love for video editing. Steve Brace, the representative from the Royal Geographical Society supporting our sub-committee, suggested making some videos introducing some of the great debates in geomorphology. These were to act as provocations to be used by teachers, showing that there are open questions in geomorphology – things we don’t understand. With the support of the membership, I started these videos and made two episodes. I enjoyed this a lot and I see this as the moment that started my journey to the Floodology YouTube channel. The events of summer 2020 led to society engaging with more important debates and I did not feel it was appropriate to continue the series then. Sadly, I did not get chance to revisit it.

In September 2021, at the end of my three-year term, I left my role as Trustee of the BSG. I did so with great memories and am pleased with what we had achieved in that time. Earlier in 2021, I had also left academia to join the Environment Agency as a Senior Advisor in Hydrology. This marked a shift in my professional focus from the mud and rocks in rivers, to the water in (and especially out) of them. I successfully stood for election as a Trustee of the British Hydrological Society (BHS) and the week after my role ended at the BSG, my new role began at the BHS.

The BHS is organised differently to the BSG and instead of having a defined role I joined as one of a group of seven ‘ordinary members’. The ordinary members are all elected Trustees, serving for three years, and each contributing to several of the sub-committees. I have had roles in the Communications and Publications and the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion sub-committees.

At this time, my wife had been helping a group apply for charitable status and had been researching charity governance in detail. This proved useful as I took in a lot of this information in by osmosis and volunteered to perform a review of the BHS’ governance following guidance from the Charity Commission. If you wish to do a similar task, I recommend the following resources:

Charity Commission’s Essential Trustee guidance (webpage).
Charity Governance Code and checklist (website).
The Charity Trustee’s Handbook (webpage).

Following my review, I made several recommendations that are currently being implemented by the board of trustees. This includes changing the BHS’s charitable status, creating new policy documents and codes of conduct, and restructuring the Society’s governance and volunteering set up.

On this last point, my recommendations drew strongly on my experience at the BSG and what I saw that worked well there. I consider myself a disorganised person (undiagnosed ADHD) but I also strongly believe that organisation and structure is immensely freeing and can inspire creativity (there’s a reason the blank page is the hardest place to start writing from). By giving each ordinary member a defined role, leading just one sub-committee, and supported by new non-trustee volunteers, I hope we will be able to achieve more and be more reflexive to challenges and opportunities.

My trustee role in the BHS will be as Chair of the Communications and Publications sub-committee and our key tasks will be:

Producing the quarterly editions of Circulation magazine.
Maintaining and growing the BHS social media channels.
Maintaining the BHS website.

But our remit does not end there. With new volunteers joining there will be new voices, fresh energy, and innovative ideas to deliver more for the benefit of the charity, for hydrology as a discipline, and for the members.

In September 2024 my term at the BHS will end. I plan to take a break from volunteering after six years at that point to focus on new things – I’d like to put more time and energy into new ventures like the FloodSkinner brand and other projects currently in development. However, I know my trustee story is not over yet and I will be back volunteering in the future when the time is right.

Being a trustee is a serious role. You take on a legal role with responsibilities and even risks. But it is highly rewarding and places you in a position where you can affect real change. It is a unique opportunity to contribute based on your skills, experiences, and drive. It is a role where you can make it what you want – just supporting the charity tick over in its day-to-day function is extremely valuable and there are always opportunities to do more.

If you’d like to know more about being a trustee, especially if you’d like my role from September 2024, please do reach out.

This post represents my own views and is not intended to represent the views of my employer, present or past.

I’ve been umm-ing and ah-ing for a couple of months now about whether to write this blog, but I think I have finally had enough. You see, in Hull, we are at risk of flooding from the sea, or more specifically, the Humber Estuary. This risk emerges when low pressure out in the North Sea, caused by the storms, which can be common in the winter, effectively suck up the sea causing it to raise a little. High winds whip up waves, and these add a little more height to the water. All of this has the potential to raise the level of the sea, for a few hours, by up to a couple of metres. On December 5^th 2013, a storm surge (as these events are called) raised the water level in the Humber by 1.7 metres.

The added complexity to this are the tides. The difference in the water level between low and high tide at Hull, according to the Associated British Ports (ABP) is between 3.5 m for a neap tide, and 6.9 m for a spring tide – this staggers the level we have determined to be 0 m, or sea level. This means the risk of flooding is all a matter of timing. If, on December 5^th 2013, the storm passed by a few hours earlier or later the surge would have aligned with the low tide, and the additional 1.7 m would have barely been noticed by anyone. However, it was timed with a high spring tide, resulting in record water levels in the Humber and caused flooding in Hull and around the Estuary.

Graphic showing how coastal, or tidal, flooding forms. This was the type of flooding which occurred around the Humber in 2013. Thanks to NERC for producing these great resources.

When we design and build flood defences on the coast we don’t build them to just hold back tidal levels of the water, but also to defend against enhanced water levels produced by storm surges. Since 2013, the defences around Hull have been updated and a repeat of the event would result in little or no flooding in the city – I don’t know the exact level of the defence, but we can say that it is able to contain sea levels of at least 1.7 m higher than the highest natural tidal level.

A big issue facing Hull is sea level rise. Sea level has been rising since the end of last ice age, and is set to continue in the future. On top of this, the climate change caused by our industry is accelerating this. Our best estimates for the Humber area, assuming that as a species we continue increasing our influence on the climate, suggest the sea level will be around 1 m higher in 100 years than they are today – this will increase the risk of flooding and we need to ensure that the public understand this and that we continue to invest in improving the standards of our defences to keep pace.

On the first point, talking to residents of Hull about the risk of flooding from the Estuary provokes two responses. (1) There is a lack of appreciation of the risk from the Estuary, and when I start to talk about the 2013 flooding, people tend to share with me their experiences of the 2007 flooding (a surface flooding event). (2) People tend to feel that there is no point in doing anything as “Hull will be underwater in 100 years”. This latter point is what I want to discuss here, it’s a common perception and leads to a kind of apathy where people become disengaged with flood risk and actions to mitigate for it, but it is wrong.

It is a deeply held belief that goes beyond even the city – in 2015, Dr Hugh Ellis, the now Head of the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA), made the claim that the city would be underwater in 100 years –

“We need to think about moving populations and we need to make new communities. We need to be thinking, does Hull have a future?” (Source – Daily Telegraph)

Ok, he was trying to make a valid point, one that sea level rise is going to increase the risk of flooding for coastal cities, but I don’t think bold, and inaccurate statements, like this are helpful, and they only result in residents of the areas becoming disengaged – why do anything about the problem if it is futile?

But where does this idea come from? Why are people convinced Hull will be underwater in 100 years? Why do people think it will become the “Venice of the North”? Well, look at the map below –

Screenshot from Climate Central’s Surging Seas Risk Zone Map – this shows the Humber Region, UK, with a 1 m sea level applied.

This is map of ‘risk’ taken for the Humber area. For areas outside of the US, the Risk Map has been produced using a map of land heights obtained from space by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, which mapped the entire globe at resolutions between 30 m and 90 m. The areas shaded in blue are all those ‘below sea level’ – normally 0 m, but in the map above I’ve set it at 1 m to represent the predicted sea level in 100 years time. Hull isn’t labelled on that map, but it basically the large blue area between North Ferriby and Hedon – very clearly ‘under water’.

But the method is problematic, it’s too simple. An average measurement of land heights over a 30 m area is fantastic when considering it is for the whole planet, however for determining flood risk it’s a bit rubbish. It smooths the land surface, removing obstacles, like wall, roads and buildings, and crucially, flood defences. The method also ignores ‘hydraulic connectivity’*, basically meaning that for water to flood an area it has to have a source of water and a route for it to get there – flood defences work by removing this hydraulic connectivity and this is why today the Humber region, and much of Holland, is close to or below sea level, but not under the sea.

To understand the actually risk posed by sea level rise requires a more complex model, one which accounts for tides, contains more detailed data, and more importantly includes flood defences. Our model (paper here behind paywall) does this, and a version of it is incorporated into Humber in a Box – with both of these we observe no flooding around the Estuary for natural tides with a 1 m sea level rise. This is because the defences are built to hold back the much higher water levels caused by storm surges.

Climate Central have been careful to refer to this shading as ‘risk’, and not direct inundation by the sea, but the use of blue and not making this explicit anywhere opens this up to mis-interpretation where ‘below sea level’ means ‘below the sea’. This is clearly happening – see this article in the Conversation, which made the BBC Sports pages, which used the app to suggest Everton’s new stadium “could end up underwater” in the future, or this article shared by the awesome Geomorphology Rules Facebook page, suggesting that coastal cities in the US will be “drowning in water”.

Sea level rise is going to increase the risk of flooding in coastal cities but they are not going to be under water. The risk does not emerge from the tidal water levels, which will most likely be contained by present defences, or those to be built in the future. However, the risk from storm surges will increase – the likelihood of events like December 5^th 2013 is set it increase, both in strength and frequency, and with 1 m extra sea level in 100 years our defences will need to be updated to cope with the enhanced levels. This will take a lot of money, a lot of effort, a lot of political will, and this requires the buy in and support of the residents of these areas. Telling them, or suggesting, that they will be required to relocate will only achieve the opposite.

Sea level rise and the related flood risk is a complex issue and we can’t keep trying to find simple answers.

*For areas within the US, the method uses much higher resolution height data, and accounts for hydraulic connectivity by shading areas differently.

GeoSkinner

Dr Chris Skinner – Geoscience Games Master and Educator

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Below Sea Level does not mean Below the Sea.