In conversation with Elizabeth Rapoport

In episode 6 of the Climate Resilience Podcast, Phil is joined by Elizabeth Rapoport, Chair of London Surface Water Strategic Group for a conversation where they dive into her roles and the experiences that have shaped her work.

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Climate Resilience Podcast, brought to you by JBA Consorts. I'm Flemington, and in this podcast series, we're going to pick some of the complexities, challenges, and opportunities on the topic of climate resilience with some inspirational thought leaders. Now, in previous episodes of the podcast, we've explored a single topic in depth with our guests. The process of change was something we looked at in episode two with Harjitt and Neil. And then we looked at recovery as a deep dive with Matt Hogan and Evie in episode four. Today's episode though is slightly different. It's what you might perhaps describe as a conversation with. And I'm delighted to say that we'll be having that conversation with Elizabeth Rappaport. So, Elizabeth, welcome to the podcast. And perhaps you could start by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about the roles you currently undertake.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Hi, Phil, thanks so much for having me. Really great to be on the podcast. Sure. So I am a planner. I spent my whole career working in planning in the built environment. I've largely worked in policy, research, and strategy, but have moved across the sector, working in public, private sector, not-for-profit, and also academia. And just over a year ago, I left my last, what I call proper job, working, leading the central strategy team at Homes England, and set up a portfolio career. So I'm now mixing consultancy with a range of non-executive roles. And in doing that, I wear several different hats. So in terms of urban resilience, I have two hats. So I am chair of something called the London Surface Water Strategic Group, which is a voluntary partnership between the Greater London Authority, London Councils, Environment Agency, Transport for London, Fire Brigade Thames Water with support from the Thames Regional Flood and Coastal Committee that's working on pulling together London's first comprehensive surface water flooding strategy. In addition to that, I also wear another hat with flooding. I am chair of my local flood action group where we're working on putting a new suds in behind my house. I think we'll come on to talk about both of those later. So I'll just quickly run through some of the other things I do. Because as I mentioned, I wear quite a few hats. I also work on the climate mitigation side. So I do two days a week consulting with a social enterprise called Living Places, working on models of delivering place-based decarbonization and retrofit. And then I also have my own company, which is called Polygon Place Strategy. And through that, I provide strategic advice to a range of clients who are ambitious about making the built environment more sustainable and good for people and the planet. And I also sit on a couple of other boards. I'm on the board of a company called Graven Hill Village Development Company, which is a council owned developer in Oxfordshire. I am also on the board of a company called Publica Community Interest Company, which promotes gender inclusion in the urban environment.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Thank you so much. There's a lot to go at here, and I'm and I'm really looking forward to the next sort of half an hour or so as we as we unpick and explore some of these very interesting um roles that you have and your experiences. I'd like to start by exploring your own personal experiences. Um and we can we can perhaps look at how they've shaped some of the roles that you that you have. I understand that you've experienced flooding directly, so maybe the starting point here is for you to share with us what you've experienced directly.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Yeah, sure, happy to. So I think to do that, we'll have to rewind to July 2021 when London experienced a very extreme flooding event. So, in numbers, uh, London experienced in about two hours the average entire July rainfall. And that led to quite a lot of surface water flooding across London, including in my neighborhood and community. On that day, we noticed a lot of rain. I was sitting there at home with uh with some friends. We just had lunch, and suddenly we noticed quite a lot of rain, and we noticed some things floating down the street, which was a bit of a strange sight, and that seemed funny. Fast forward about 60 minutes later, we started getting calls on the WhatsApp group because neighbors were flooding. We noticed a lot of water pooling outside of our uh bifold doors and pouring down through our garden. And it became kind of an all hands-to-the-pump situation, no pun intended, in which everyone was running around the neighborhood trying to help neighbors. Some people were okay, some people weren't. Um, my husband went up the road to help a neighbor who was flooding, ended up in her back garden for two hours with about 10 other people trying to redirect water into storm drains. Everything was completely overloaded. It was a really frightening experience. Uh, it was a really unexpected experience. The thing about surface water flooding is it just sort of seems to come from nowhere. It's really difficult to understand when it happens to you. And it's really um, you know, really destabilizing. So after that event, the impacts of that started becoming apparent. So in our neighborhood, where we are in our catchment is somewhat upstream. So although we were affected, our our garage was flooded, our home was only saved by the fact that the seals on our bifold doors held, and my next door neighbors weren't so lucky. But the real impacts of that started to be seen in the days afterwards because the water that came through our street went further downstream. It flooded my children's school. It my children's school was knee-deep on the ground floor in contaminated water. We live near Whips Cross Hospital, which anyone who knows anything about the July 21 floods will know that Whips Cross Hospital had to evacuate their AE. So it was a whole step change for me in my thinking about resilience and flooding and the way it affected me, my neighbors, and also my wider community.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Yeah, um, and experiencing it firsthand must have, as you say, uh shaped your views and probably some of the roles and positions that you've undertaken over the last couple of years. Um you spoke there a little bit about how yourselves and the community responded during the experience, but what happened after the experience as well? What happened in the in the sort of days and weeks after the incident?

SPEAKER_01 6:07

After the incident, there was a huge amount of interest among my immediate neighbors in trying to understand what happened and trying to stop it from happening again. And I think of the response, and we're three years out now, over three years out from that experience. And I think of the response now in three phases. So the first phase, we had a series of early organizing efforts. And now remember this, these were COVID times. So we all met in an outdoor space and tried to talk about what happened and what we thought we we could do together to stop it happening again. And, you know, we started trying to talk to the council and talk to Thames Water and figure out who we needed to speak to, who was responsible, who could help us. And that phase was really challenging because we didn't really know what to do. We didn't know who to speak to, we didn't know how to get help. We did get the council to do a flooding into our incident, but nothing really got started until what I now think of as the beginning of the second phase, which was in August 2022, when the National Flood Forum came in. They were supported by, there was a pilot supported by the Council and also Thames Water to appoint the National Flood Forum, which is a charity, to help us create a flood action group. And when that happened, everything started changing because that flood action group and the support from the National Flood Forum enabled us to start putting together the questions that we had to the responsible agencies in a way that enabled them to respond to it. So that mediation between us as residents and all of those organizations that were responsible for helping us suddenly became mediated, it became supported, and we were able to enter into productive conversations. Those have continued since then. We got support to do an initial feasibility study for a SUS that would help alleviate some of the flooding that we face. And we're now, I'm really excited to say, entering into stage three. We've secured funding from the environment agency to implement the SUDs that's going to help us manage the flooding, uh, the surface water flooding that affects not just our neighborhood, but also you know the neighborhoods and social infrastructure downstream. And we are entering into the detailed design of that, and we're hoping that they'll actually start putting it in next year.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

Wow, and well done on taking all the all the steps that you have. And it sounds like a really interesting um journey uh since 21. And um, I think there's possibly another podcast here in terms of um that process of setting up a flood action group. I'd love to, I'd love to have time to explore that with you on another episode. Um you alluded then to how those experiences shaped your your views on climate and climate resilience. So maybe just um expand on that a little bit, please.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

Yeah, I mean, it completely changed my perspective on vulnerability because I mentioned earlier when the flooding start happened, we were just sitting having Sunday lunch with some friends, and suddenly you start seeing all this water flood down the street. And thinking about it now, I had no frame of reference for what was going on. I had no way to understand it, no idea how to respond in the moment, no idea whatsoever how to stop it happening then or or again. And you think about the types of disasters that can happen in our lives. You know, I I lead a relatively privileged life, right? You know, fairly, fairly comfortable existence here in a country where I don't have to worry about war and famine and all of the things that other people have to worry about. So I don't have frames of reference for some of these big disasters that will happen. I can conceptualize getting burgled, I can conceptualize having a fire in my house, but having water suddenly, you know, over the course of 60 minutes piling them up against my back doors, you know, and coming into my house, I didn't know how to deal with that. And that's really frightening. And I was also quite humbling because I'm a planner, I'm a built environment professional. I have a doctorate in urban sustainability and resilience. Before I bought my house, I checked the flood maps. I was working in a senior central government role. You know, I I was frankly, I think, a bit arrogant about my understanding of the risks that I faced. And it was really humbling to realize I genuinely had no clue at all. And it for me, what it changed was my understanding of vulnerability in the urban environment, because our vulnerability from climate risk is hidden in the fabric of our cities. You know, years ago we paved over the rivers and we've now forgotten that they're there. We're completely disconnected from the natural world in what I think is a really dangerous way.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

That's a really interesting insight, actually. Um, the fact that we are hidden perhaps from some of these climate hazards uh through the way that our urban spaces have been designed and the way that we interact with those. Uh uh and so perhaps then onto your professional experiences, you alluded there to the fact that you are an urban planner. Um what what do you think are the opportunities to integrate the work that you do as an urban planner through design with other disciplines that that will help the whole of society become more resilient to climate change?

SPEAKER_01 11:14

I'm really glad we're getting into this topic because I am an unashamed urban planning geek. I think planning is a is a brilliant discipline. Uh perhaps much maligned in this country, but but actually, you know, it's got so much to add in how we think about how we adapt to the changing climate in an urban environment. And I really think it needs to be central to these conversations. So there's a few things thinking about planning that I think we can bring in. The first one is systems thinking. The reason I got into planning is that I have a wide range of interests. The great thing about planning, it's a little bit of everything. You're trying to govern land use and make decisions about how we use land, how we use space and place to deliver outcomes that society wants. And you fundamentally have to then look to that in a systemic way. Think about the environment, think about the economy, think about social needs. There's always multiple considerations in every decision you make as a planner that you have to balance. So I think all good planners are system thinkers. They're always looking at the wider system and how if you pull one thread, how that impacts the wider system, what what happens at the end of that thread? What else are you influencing? And I think actually the same applies for the best people working in the resilience space. So I think that system thinking perspective is really something that the planning profession can bring and integrate it with the way in which systems thinking happens in resilience. And then just to have a complete departure from that, the other thing I think planning in the built environment professions can bring to this is creativity and joy. Architects, landscape architects, urban designers. I those are not my professions, but I've worked alongside them my entire career. And it's a very aspirational discipline. They really aim to inspire and create places people can thrive. And I think we need more of that and resilience, more thinking about how we can create places that actually people will really enjoy as well as being safe, because I think that's how you're going to appeal to a lot of people when you're trying to do difficult things in the built environment. So the example I always drawn is the way in which you've got loads of creative interventions where suds can double as play areas. You know, you're bringing nature back into cities and allowing children to engage with it. I also think there's a lot more we can do with arts and culture, bringing nature back into our cities through creative interventions, you know, showing the watercourse of our lost rivers through urban design. So I'd love to see more of that coming in and work on climate resilience. And then I could go on, there's lots of things. Um, but I think one thing that came up for me yesterday when I was actually out uh looking at some suds with the team from Enfield Council, was the role of engagement. And one of the officers I was talking to was saying that he thinks they can learn more about engagement from the placemaking disciplines because a lot of work, particularly when you're talking about suds and other elements of resilience, comes from engineering disciplines. It comes from the highways tradition, and those aren't necessarily disciplines where you're taught to engage in the same way that you are when you are coming up through a planning education. And I think it's just so important that we engage with communities as much as possible on these. And personal experiences really showed me this. So as a planner, I'm used to engaging with, and I'm using, you know, air quotes here, the community. But for me, that experience of suddenly becoming the community to be engaged with in my local area and the work with our flood action group, you suddenly see a different side to this. And I think it's really taught me how important that is. Because when you're coming in as a community member working on this, I mean, just the acronyms alone take you years to learn.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Yeah, yeah. I'm so glad, I'm so glad you've mentioned engagement actually at that point, because um it is central to my work and a lot of the work that we do in JBA to root whole society um resilience in everything that we that we do. Um you know, and this this term whole society has has emerged from the national resilience framework that the government produced in December of 2022. So it's a few a few years now. But um, you know, we we we all too often I think um tick the box with engagement. We've we've done our engagement event, we've we've invited people along to do something uh or or to some kind of event. But actually, are we really engaging in a way that will inspire people to co-create, to um uh uh have a an improved awareness, but also coming back to that point that you raised earlier, to have joy and enjoyment in the places that they live and work. And ultimately the the goal here is to create places that everybody wants to live and work in, isn't it? So that's really interesting. That's really interesting, and again, it might it feels like another conversation that we could have at a later date, perhaps. Um so I mean, in terms of urban urban planning then, uh what are the what are the obstacles? What are the what are the barriers that perhaps we we need to overcome uh as we build more climate-resilient societies?

SPEAKER_01 16:15

Where do I start? Um there are a lot, and I I love talking about barriers because to me, and I'm a strategist, that's the bulk of what strategy work is, is figuring out what you want to achieve and then identifying the barriers that are in your way, and then systematically dismantling them. And that's that's what that's what we have to do with resilience. We have to just engage with those barriers. So I think about this a lot, and I've been trying to think about how I do that in a considered and systematic way. And one of the things that's helping me at the moment is that I'm doing a course on regenerative thinking and design and policy right now. And one of the things I'm learning from that is the importance of having the right goals and mindsets, because often in barriers, we start focusing in on little things, and the little things are important, but you can't fix them if you don't have the right goals and mindsets in place at the top. And so just to lean in a little bit on mindsets, I think there is a need in resilience for new mindsets. And what you were just referring to about the whole society approach is brilliant because that's what we need. But I also think with resilience thinking, we have to think about how we define resilience. I remember back when I was doing my, you know, my course and my doctorate about resilience, we talked a lot about different definitions of it and the extent to which you should talk about resilience as bouncing back or bouncing forward. Now, I'm very much of the mind that when we talk about resilience, we should be bouncing forward when an event happens, when we're looking at community resilience, what can we do to actually, as part of the response, put something in place that takes us forward closer to where we want to be as a society? And what gets in our way? Well, I think what I see a lot are things being put in what I call the too hard box. So I see so much where the changes that we need to make, people know them, but they just think, do you know what? That is really difficult. And so we settle for incremental adjustments or we do more studies to better understand the problem and we don't actually face into the problem. Where does this come from? I think it comes from a fear of change. I think we need to adopt the mindset, coming back to this issue of mindsets, the change is possible and we can fix this. So a good friend of mine, Sarah Itioka, wrote a book called Flourish with Michael Pollen, where they talk about the new paradigms that we need in planning in the built environment sector to deal with our planetary emergency. And they talk about how in planning for the built environment, uncertainty and fear of change can lead us to a near stasis. Because we fear change, then what happens is we bureaucratize it. So you create these systems that we have to work within, they create a situation where when someone has an innovative, game-changing idea, they get stuck in the system and they spend years on studies and reports and endless meetings with endless agencies to actually do something that everybody more or less agrees should be done, but the system won't allow. So if we can change our mindset to we want to bounce forward, we're not afraid of change, we're going to lean into the really hard things and think that yes, we can fix this. I think that then opens up possibilities to start to unpick the systems that do become barriers. And when we're looking at those systems, we have to dive into what Indy Johar calls the boring revolution, which is that big goals are unlocked by really dull things. And certainly that was my experience when I worked worked in central government. You know, the biggest changes that I made were changes to government spending rules, ways in which things are calculated in spreadsheets, how we procure stuff. And these things, these are the things that people throw up to me all the time as barriers to action. And frankly, it it makes me really sad because they're so small. This problem is huge. It's absolutely enormous. And the change that we need to do is huge. We can't afford to let small things get in our way. So when people start talking to me about procurement rules as the big barriers to action, I just want to say, yes, they are, but don't forget that we created them, right? Like these are not something that exists as permanent structures that are external to us. They are socially created by us. So we, if we created these systems and they need to change, let's change them.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are there's there's there's so much to go at here. Um and that was a really insightful and and considered um um sort of conversation from you there. Um so I I was I was particularly struck as I often am about how we might define resilience. And this is something that I you know I spent a lot of my time considering and thinking about. And and actually for me, it's about well, I the phrase I use a lot is better and more integrated benefits. Um and and you know, traditionally we might have looked at um the the outcome of our investment being measured perhaps in in terms of the number of properties that we're protecting. But actually, resilience and whole society resilience is about better and more integrated benefits. So ones that include social capital or human capital or natural capital, or maybe the the bet the benefits to our the resilience of our systems and our assets and our infrastructure. So it's about a broader and more holistic and more integrated set of benefits. And that that I think for me is sort of touching on what what what you were what you were alluding to there. Um finally, then in terms of your professional sort of experiences and as a as a as a planner, um, is there anything that would unlock a step change in in the way that we we design and plan our urban environment? Big question.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

You used a word just there that I I I Want to repeat, which was holistic. And I think that's that's the key to it, is we really have to look at holistic solutions. And that comes back to what I was saying earlier about systems thinking and looking up at how does the entire system work and not just trying to optimize one part of it, right? Because that always leads to un un undesired outcomes. We have to look at this thing holistically. And it's going to be a huge collective effort. We need to get everyone involved. And when I look at what's going on just this week, you know, with flooding in in South Wales, when we look at what happened in Valencia, when these incidents happen, a lot of the public narrative becomes about well, whose fault was that? Who do we blame for this? And I can't help I don't know if it's cynical or if it's the right thing to say, but but my thought is, well, it's our fault. It's everyone's fault, right? It's my fault, it's your fault, it's it's our entire society's fault. We're we're part of it, right? So, but instead of wringing our hands, we need to pick up and say, well, we have a collective responsibility to fix it, right? So that's that's the key thing for me is that it's collective and we have to find a way to get everyone involved in fixing this problem rather than people thinking, well, let's outsource this to agencies or you know, the government or the water companies or the insurance industry. We all have to work together. But that's not going to happen unless we can communicate about these issues better because we can't land that message that this is everyone's responsibility and everyone has to pitch in without getting a lot better about defining and communicating the wider benefits of climate adaptation, which is something you you were just talking about, you know, looking at all the things that would be better if we were managing this risk better. But I think it really requires changing our language. We've got to fix this. I looked at the flood risk maps for my house before I bought it. I did not understand them clearly based on what happened, you know, less than a year after I bought it. So we don't understand the risk. We're not communicating it well. I still don't have a clue what one in 30, one in a hundred mean. Okay. You know, practically, what does that really mean? We we we've got to change the language. And then the other thing I think about a lot is just the need to do something. I think we need, as as in London and as a country, we need some really big ambitious examples of how interdisciplinary action can make a real difference to people's lives and to the planet. Because sometimes when you're in the thick of this work, it's it's hard. Working on climate is hard and it can be, frankly, kind of depressing. You know, you come home at the end of the day. It's tough. I think we all need something that we can be proud of.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

Yeah, yeah. Um as we move then into sort of the final conversation uh within within the episode today, I want to just pick on pick up on something that you said there about working together. Now, clearly, collaboration is at the very heart of your work in in London, um, the work that you alluded to in your introduction. So, um uh how have your previous personal and and professional experiences and that whole point around collaboration, uh cross-sector collaboration, I'm sure, helped you in your role steering the London surface water strategy then?

SPEAKER_01 25:33

Sure. Before I get into that, should I give a brief recap of what happened in London and in July 21? Yeah, I mean, a lot of people might might know about this, but um I can give a summary introduction of what happened in London because that's what led to the creation of the strategic group. So I mentioned earlier that in July 2021, London had a couple of severe rainfall events. One of these, we had 100 millimeters of rainfall, which is twice the average July rainfall in two hours, which led to a huge amount of implications across the city. So, just in terms of some of the numbers that I can roll off, we had aggregated insurance losses in excess of 281 million. We had closure or partial closure of 30 London underground stations, we had the evacuation of hospital wards. It was on a Sunday, so the schools weren't evacuated, but lots of schools were flooded. And I always like to make the point at the end of that list of numbers is that I'm really happy, and giving it that I don't have to list the number of casualties. It happened on a Sunday afternoon when people were awake and schools were empty, people in basement flats were at risk, they were able to get out. We're really, really lucky, but we might not be so lucky the next time. After that happened, all of the organizations that have some level of responsibility for managing surface water flooding in London came together. The mayor convened a round table. And what came out of that was London has a real challenge in terms of the ownership of this risk, because it is divided among 33 different lead local flood authorities, the Greater London Authority has a strategic authority for London, Environment Agency who has statutory responsibility for managing the riparian issues of flooding, Transport for London, who's responsible for the highways in lots of parts of London, et cetera, et cetera. So what's brilliant about the group is that all of those organizations decided to come together on a voluntary basis to work together to solve the problem. And I think that's really the heart of the collaboration that we're having in London, is this collaboration between these groups. And it's great. It's really, really helpful because it enables us to work together in a holistic and integrated way. I think coming back to your question, which was about my experiences and background and how that's helped me steer the strategy, I've been doing it for just about a year. So I was appointed at the end of last year. So I'm coming up to the end of my first year. I've got two more years left. Um, and I think it's great that you asked about personal and professional because when I walked into the interview for the role, I brought both of them to the table. And I think it's probably what got their job got me the job. Um, and it's and it's the combination of the two that I think have helped me a lot. I mean, starting maybe with the personal, I think I keep purpose at the table or hope, maybe. Because strategy work needs purpose. It's really tricky, I imagine, for the members of the strategic group to sit in front of someone who's been personally impacted by flooding and tell them it's just too hard to fix, right? So keeping that purpose front, front and center is is is probably part of it. Because if my house floods, if my children's school floods again, leading to three years of disruption, which is what happened last time, they will have to answer to me. Um I think I feel slightly nervous saying that because I certainly don't mean that in a in a you know in a in a in a negative way. I think a huge amount of work is going on, but I do think finding someone as a chair who can keep that purpose front and center has probably helped. And then professionally, I'm a strategist, right? It's what I do. So I'm pretty good at seeing through problems and and finding the source. I mean, the first thing I did when I got to the role was adjust the governance. You know, I bring mission and purpose and vision and hope, but I also bring a keen eye for looking at decision-making processes and understanding when they're not working well enough, looking at governance papers, all of that kind of boring detail that is really important to running things. And I think because I've had this really varied career where I've moved across different sectors, I've been in public sector, private sector, academia, I've learned to understand how systems work. So I understand structures and incentives that run things behind the scenes. And that happens when you work across sectors. You learn that every different system has its incentive structures and how to tap into those. I think the other thing I bring is being relatively unfloppable. So I mentioned my last role was in central government. I was at a central government housing and regeneration agency at a time when we had four prime ministers, six housing ministers, three CEOs. You know, I know how to learn work in a turbulent system. And you learn through that how to build consensus, manage disagreements, tear decisions through complex organizations. So I'm I'm pretty comfortable with all of that. And one thing I don't actually talk about as much in this job, but I do think is relevant is um is my research background. So I did spend 10 years doing international urban research. I do have a doctorate, so I'm pretty good at looking at information and separating out the signal from the noise, which I think is really important in this field because there's so much information. We're certainly not at a loss for data and reports and evidence, but trying to figure out what to do with that, trying to figure out what is material and actually build good strategy and policy on that is something that I can bring. And I think just the final one is that I communicate like a human. I'm not saying other people in the sector don't, but because I'm not an expert in this, it has to be explained to me by all of the amazing experts I work with how this really works in layperson's terms. And then I take that language and I help communicate that more widely.

SPEAKER_00 31:29

There's there's something really interesting there, isn't there, about converting the technical, the data, the complex into a very relatable form and format that is um uh accessible for uh non-technical specialists and non-technical experts and the whole of society, actually, which is something we spoke about earlier. Um, so yeah, there's something really interesting there, isn't there, about how we communicate. Um, look, we are um time is uh sort of against us really because we've had such a wonderful conversation. But I suppose the the final question is um in in heavily urbanized places like London, what are the big challenges or the biggest challenges that we face uh in tackling climate change? And I'm aware that that is an enormous question to finish on.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

That is a big question. Uh there are so many challenges, so many barriers. We've talked about some of the barriers earlier, haven't we? But if I'm going to take it up to a macro scale and not get into all of the challenges like procurement and legal issues, it's the need to make really difficult decisions. I think as we face into the reality of climate change and the need to adapt, when you're in a dense urban environment, any decision you make will impact a lot of people. Now it's not to say that challenging decisions made in more rural areas aren't also hard, but the number of people affected, the number of places affected is just so huge. And if you match that with the pace of change that is required, you've got quite a challenge. And that comes back to issues we were talking earlier about communication and engagement and how you're going to bring people along on this journey because it's really difficult. And people, by and large, don't like change. And we're talking about potentially some quite big changes. So that need for the engagement with quite a lot of people and the need to move at pace and scale for me is the biggest challenge in the urban environment. And just to come back to something I said earlier, part of the reason it's hard is because we lack the understanding of what's going on. Just coming back to my story about when it happened to me and just not even understanding what was happening. And the fact that all of this vulnerability is hidden from the view of your everyday citizen in London makes it even harder because when you're asking people to make changes, you're asking them to make changes because of something that they don't really understand or even accept as an issue. So it's really, really tricky. And I think this disconnect we have living in cities between our actions and their consequences is part of the problem. You know, if you if you sort of pave over your driveway, the vast majority of people don't understand the impact that has on the flooding of your local high street or hospital, right? It's it's it's it's there's so much to do in terms of increasing understanding.

SPEAKER_00 34:44

Wow, and we have covered so much there in in our time together. And I and I, as I have alluded to on a number of occasions, I think there's definitely an opportunity to bring you back onto the podcast at some point in the future and explore some of these other themes in in greater depth. Um, your role in setting up your local flood action group and the challenges that that may have presented, uh, or the sort of comms and engagement uh element of what we've discussed today. Elizabeth, thank you for your time. It's been really uh wonderful to have you on the podcast and for you to share some of your personal professional experiences and indeed those from your work um in London. And so we have reached the end of our time today. As always, if you've enjoyed listening, then please do subscribe uh so you're ready for our next episode in a couple of weeks' time. Till then, thank you for joining us. I'm Phil Eminson, and you've been listening to the Climate Resilience Podcast brought to you by JBA Consulting.