Welcome to the CREW Website

'Community Resilience to Extreme Weather' (CREW) is a research project, established to develop a set of tools for improving the capacity for resilience of local communities to the impacts of future extreme weather events

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What is CREW?

The floods of 2007 led to the UK's largest peacetime emergency since World War II and the recent events in Cumbria clearly indicate the effects and impacts of extreme weather. The impact of climate change means that the probability of similar flood events is expected to increase. Extreme weather leads not only to flooding, but can also give rise to a range of other weather-induced hazards, for example, heatwaves, storms, soil subsidence and water-shortage.

With a changing climate and the predictions that there will be wetter winters, warmer summers and greater frequencies of extreme weather, how can local communities interpret these headline warnings and understand the likely real impacts to them and, consequently, prepare themselves appropriately?

The project 'Community Resilience to Extreme Weather' (CREW) has been established to gain a better understanding of the effects of future climate change on extreme weather events, and to develop a set of tools for improving local-community resilience.

Who will benefit from CREW?

• Decision makers for community resilience
• Property owners
• Insurance companies
• The building industry
• Small to medium sized business enterprises (SMEs)
• The research community

Research focus

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has funded the CREW programme to bring together scientists from a range of engineering, social and physical sciences from 14 UK Universities to determine likely future extreme weather events and to seek to develop a set of useful web-based mapping and information tools to capture and explain the latest state-of-the-art extreme weather event modelling, focussed on our South London study area.

CREW focusses on understanding the probability of current and future extreme weather events and their likely socio-economic impacts. Initiatives, such as the Stern Review, provide high-level socio-economic impacts but do not provide the sub-regional or local estimates pertinent at the community and individual scale. Therefore, the CREW consortium is investigating impacts at the local level (on householders, SMEs and local policy/decision makers). The research is also investigating the opportunities and limitations for local communities' adaptive capacity. CREW, using five South East London boroughs as case studies, is considering the decision making processes across communities including impediments and drivers of change. A web-based portal will provide a facility for presenting probable extreme weather events for a range of scenarios, and for presenting and evaluating coping mechanisms.

Key Objectives

The project has been established to:

• gain a better understanding of the impacts of extreme weather events (current and future) on local communities, based on three community groupings: householders, SMEs and decision makers;
• integrate social and physical research to develop an improved understanding of risk from EWEs at the community level;
• study the complex inter-relationships between community groups in order to improve our understanding of the risks, vulnerabilities, barriers and drivers that affect the resilience of a local community to extreme weather events;
• quantify and rank a number of technical and adaptive coping measures for reducing vulnerability to extreme weather;
• develop web-based information dissemination tools for integrating the project outputs. This will deliver maps, reports and guidance on impacts and resilience measures for extreme weather.

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The project has a number of inter-linked work programme packages:

• PP1 Coping Technologies - People and Buildings
• PP2 Community Coping - Resilience capacity and coping strategies
• PP3 Impacts - Socio-Economic simulators (EWESEM)
• PP4 Hazards - Extreme Weather Event Simulators (SWERVE)
• PP5 Dissemination - Web-display and interface for programme outputs (WISP)
• PP6 Management - Project coordination and management

Study Areas

For a study area, the CREW project focusses upon five local authority areas in London, to the South of the River Thames, namely Croydon, Bromley, Lewisham, Greenwich, and Bexley. These are shown on the map below.

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If you are a CREW Project Partner, please register to create an account and then contact the Administrator.

Here is a CREW Project Overview in Powerpoint format to explain our work.

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