Success in RAE's UK-China Urban Flooding Research Impact Programme

The project, titled ESPRIT (Embedding Strategic Planning in Flood Resilient ciTies), is a collaboration between CWS and the School of Environment (SOE) at Tsinghua University, China. ESPRIT aims to create a framework for developing innovative solutions to strengthen cities’ resilience against flooding through intense academic-industry-government collaboration. The framework will evaluate the effectiveness of interventions to support decision makers in strategic planning and adaptation measure development.

ESPRIT is strongly supported by the industry and local authorities from both countries. The industry partners, including Jacobs, Sweco on the UK side and the North China Municipal Engineering Design & Research Institute (NCMEDRI) and the Design and Research Institute of Suzhou University of Science and Technology Co Ltd. (USTSDRI) on the Chinese side, will contribute their expertise in planning and construction of environmental and infrastructure engineering.

Six local authorities, including Torbay Council from the UK, and Doumen (Zhuhai), Ningbo, Pingxiang, Qingdao and Suzhou in China, have joined the ESPRIT consortium. These governments are desperate to find sustainable solutions to better protect the citizens and will work closely with academic and industry partners to develop the decision support framework allowing efficient and effective flood resilience planning.

Royal Academy of Engineering will provide a funding of £70,000 to support ESPRIT from April 2018 to April 2020. The CWS team will be led by Dr Albert Chen, Prof Guangtao Fu, Prof Slobodan Djordjevic and Prof Dragan Savic; and the SOE team will be led by Prof Haifeng Jia.

ESPRIT will be the next step in an already wide collaboration between CWS at CEMPS and SOE and will further strengthen the partnership between the University of Exeter and Tsinghua.