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By Rodrigo Santos Andrade
Britain’s most artificial landscape may not survive climate change
visibility comment0 event September 16, 2026 timer 09:22
The Fens are a food-growing powerhouse, but the landscape only exists thanks to humans holding back the sea.
Stretching across much of eastern England, the Fens produce a third of the country’s vegetables and support tens of thousands of jobs. Yet around 33% of the region lies below average sea level, while 87% is below the highest spring tides
The landscape only exists due to centuries of engineering – pumps, embankments and drainage channels – that keeps water moving almost constantly. Now climate change is introducing new challenges that this system was never designed to face.
The Fens face several climate threats that reinforce one another. Rising sea levels, heavier downpours, hotter summers, longer droughts and biodiversity loss are all expected to intensify over the coming decades. These are all serious challenges, and in the Fens they will play out within one tightly interconnected system.
The Fens cover parts of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Norfolk:
The Fens (dark green) and their wider catchment area (light green). The map on the right shows the area (shaded blue) below the mean high spring tides that would be at risk without human engineering.
Environment Agency / Arup: ‘Fens 2100+: Summary baseline report’, CC BY-SA
In June, we published an academic analysis of these climate risks in the Fens. Our research examined flood risk from rivers, surface water and the sea, alongside drought, water scarcity, heat, biodiversity loss and agricultural productivity. It found that these hazards increasingly overlap as the climate warms.
With around 2°C of warming, the region will experience more frequent flooding, more extreme heat, declining summer river flows and accelerated biodiversity loss.
By 2100, under a 4°C warming scenario, annual flood damages to homes and businesses in the region could rise from £16 million today to £250 million, while ecosystems could collapse and parts of the Fens would be rendered uninhabitable without major investment in new infrastructure.
Importantly, sea-level rise is different from other risks as it will continue for centuries even if global temperatures are stabilised. Even a high emissions scenario, where the sea would rise by a metre by 2100, would still be followed by further rise. This is an existential risk for the low-lying Fens, meaning that more radical adaptation approaches will be needed in the long term. Decisions about how to adapt must begin well before then, as major changes to infrastructure and land management take decades to plan and implement.
Connected climate hazards
National climate risk assessments are essential, but they can mask the severity and complexity facing regions with distinct characteristics. The Fens is a case in point given its low-lying geography means that it is exposed to multiple climate risks that can compound each other.
River flows could fall by more than 25% under 4°C warming, at the same time as floods from surface water, rivers and seas would increase. Agriculture could faces crop losses from both drought and water scarcity and from water logging and flooding, alongside a decline in insect pollinators that could reduce productivity. These issues cannot be managed by only tackling single hazards in turn.
We therefore developed a way to assess all the climate-related risks to a single place, rather than looking at each hazard in isolation. This provides an integrated picture of how multiple risks develop and interact over time, and gives interested people and groups locally relevant information to help them plan for climate change.
Aligned with the engineering evidence
A schematic map of the many rivers, canals and other waterways that keep the Fens drained.
Environment Agency / Arup: ‘Fens 2100+: Summary baseline report’, CC BY-SA
The Environment Agency’s Fens 2100+ programme, published in April 2026, reaches similar conclusions on the region’s infrastructure. For the first time, it brings together evidence on the entire flood risk management system, covering around 17,000 assets including 318 pumping stations, embankments and tidal defences.
Together, these assets are estimated to provide £58.8 billion in benefits through avoided flood damage over the next 100 years. However, nearly a third of these defences need upgrading in the next 15 years.
Both our analysis and the Fens 2100+ evidence conclude that dealing with these challenges separately or only in the short term cannot work.
The Fens needs to be considered as one connected landscape with decisions about flood protection, water, agriculture and the environment made together. Coastal lowlands around the world, from the Netherlands to the Mekong delta in Vietnam, are grappling with similar interconnected challenges of sea level rise, flooding and competing demands for land and water. The approach we have developed could be applied to help people in these regions assess their options for adaptation.
Katie Jenkins received funding from the UK Environment Agency to provide a Fens Climate Change Risk Assessment. The assessment drew on earlier work funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) through the OpenCLIM (Open CLimate Impacts Modelling framework) project (NE/T013931/1). Support provided from the CoCliCo Project (Coastal Climate Core Services) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program grant agreement number 101003598 to enable exploration of Future Climate Services is also gratefully acknowledged.Robert James Nicholls received funding from the Horizon 2020 program of the European Commission through the CoCliCo project (#101003598).
Tags: Academic Journalism, The Conversation, The Conversation Academic News
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