Is flood forecasting failing?

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Hello, lovely, curious-minded listeners.

You're listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

Today, we'll be finding out how some of the billions of bacteria that occupy our guts are finding their way into the bodies of our friends and our friends' friends.

And why can we not find a better, more sustainable alternative to ubiquitous, useful, but environmentally polluting plastic?

But first, water was pouring down some of the streets of my hometown during Storm Burt, but that was nothing compared to the scenes in the South Wales town of Pontypreath.

Cars submerged at a garage, people using bins to bail filthy floodwater out of their homes, and the beautiful park and Ledo transformed into a brown, murky mess.

And we've been here before.

Pontypreath was severely flooded just four and a half years ago.

These are scenes that now play out around the UK every winter.

So is the way we warn people about flooding failing?

We're going to unpick exactly how floods are forecast, how flood alerts work, and what went wrong here.

So let's start with a first-hand account from local resident John Pocket.

We were out as usual on Saturday night.

People were talking about having a rough time the next day from Stormbirth, but nobody at all mentioned anything about flood warning.

So nobody knew that there was this imminent danger.

First we knew about it was when family members came knocking the door and shouting, Are you okay here?

The river had burst its bank just yards down from us.

We, in the meantime, had gathered the ornamental gravel, I suppose, from the front garden, put it into recycling bags to make our own sandbags because there was nobody about for us to ask.

In terms of the warnings, well, there weren't just any.

I find it amazing with the technology.

Fortunately, we for our part didn't suffer this time, but there were others who did suffer a second dose within four and a half years.

And I think that's not good enough.

We're all entitled to expect better in terms of warnings.

Thank you so much to John Pocket there for being kind enough to tell us the story of what he's been through over the last few days.

And our thoughts are with everyone who's been affected.

Now Professor Hannah Cloak is with me.

She's a natural hazards researcher and hydrologist who leads investigations into early warning systems for flooding.

Hi Hannah, welcome to the programme.

Hi, hi.

And so what John was saying there was that he felt that there wasn't sufficient warning, that he didn't hear a warning.

I mean that's very distressing actually to hear that there's no warning because as somebody who works in making forecasting and warning systems better and making sure that we get that technology right and we get those warnings communicated to people on the ground.

When I hear there was no warning and yet a flood happened, I know something's gone wrong with that system.

We have good technology so we start off with things like satellites and measurements on the ground and then we do forecasting, so weather forecasting, trying to work out how much rain is going to fall and then we need to work out what happens when that rain hits the landscape.

Does it run straight off?

Does it soak into the ground and move through those slower pathways through the ground?

And then we need to use the physics of river flow to work out how fast that flood rushing down the river will move and when it will hit the town downstream.

And then work out what the water will do once it's overwhelmed the banks and is reaching into people's properties.

And that's very, very difficult.

And that's not even starting the warning communication bit, which is a whole different section at the bottom.

That's just the physics part, part right?

So then

how do you get the warnings to people that will be affected?

So most of this is based on a trigger, so the level of the water in the river and how that is related to how many properties are going to be flooded.

So it might reach quite a high level and there'll be an alert issued meaning that there's possibility that properties will be flooded and low-lying areas will probably be flooded.

And then as the river rises higher, you'll get to a different trigger level.

So in Ponty Price, in this case, what went wrong?

I think the first thing is to say that those trigger levels may have not been calibrated properly, they're not set properly, so those need looking at.

It is very difficult, and they can be set up for one flood, and the landscape is changing all the time.

People are building things, the river is changing, so getting that exactly right is a very difficult job indeed, and they always need re-looking at.

But there were other stuff going on here, too.

The Met Office had issued a yellow warning for rain,

and there were lots of it was

felt a bit overwhelming I think at times and of course the flood warnings are given by Natural Resources Wales and in England in the Environment Agency and they're not in the same place they're not on the same website you can't see the flood warning and and the Met Office warning at the same time and I think people were feeling a bit confused about what that meant

and certainly the yellow warning that's a very interesting one because the yellow people were interpreting it to mean oh well it doesn't look so bad so we probably don't need to do anything.

Whereas, in fact, it meant actually something bad might be happening.

It looks a little bit uncertain.

So

there's some communication problems there in the interpretation of what that yellow warning means.

As you kind of alluded to there,

even if you get the messaging right, a lot comes down to how people respond as well.

That's right.

And this is the kind of behavioural psychology bit.

We need to understand what people are thinking in that moment and what action they're actually going to take, what they're going to decide to take.

It's often very difficult for people to imagine a flood is going to happen, even if they've been flooded before.

They tend to have this bias that they think, oh, it'll probably be all right.

Or a different group of people who have been flooded before can be very, very anxious about it and worry excessively.

And so you've got all of these different things going on at the same time.

So a lot comes down to people's behaviour, people's response to what is happening.

So how do you factor that into flood alerts, warning, messaging?

Yeah, that is very, very important.

I mean, we put a lot of energy, a lot of money, we run a lot of supercomputers trying to predict rainfall, trying to predict river flow, and to get those flood forecasts right.

But actually, that's all entirely pointless unless we can understand people and their choices and what they choose to do in a flood.

Yeah.

But just to be clear,

you're not suggesting that it's people's own fault for being in the way of flood water.

It's not their fault, we are not communicating that risk well enough.

Certainly, getting the communication, I think, of the warnings right so people trust them as well.

That's a that's a very important step.

But also helping them to imagine, and we must think outside of the box.

It can't just be kind of changing the Met Officers' warnings, is you know, is one thing to do, but the other thing to do is to build it into daily life so that at school, at work, we're all very used to understanding our flood risk and know what to do if it does flood.

Because this is inevitable in a changing climate where we've built on floodplains, do we just all need to live with flooding from time to time?

Well, we're going to have to learn to live with flooding.

Yes, that's exactly right.

We've seen this in Pontyprice, right?

Four years ago, there was a big flood.

There's another one now.

There will be another one coming.

Flood defences are helpful and we should put them in where we can.

We should support that financially where we can.

But we also have to realize that we cannot defend everyone everywhere from flooding.

That's an impossibility.

So the more that we can adapt our homes, the more that we can understand what to do when it does flood to keep ourselves safe and also to help our property be resilient to that flood, the better.

Yeah, absolutely.

Hannah Cloak, Professor of Hydrology at the University of Reading.

Thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Thank you.

And Hannah was the science advisor on a new drama about how people prepare for floods.

You can have a listen to Chloe's ARC on BBC Sounds now.

And we should say that Natural Resources Wales, who issue those alerts, says its message to professional partners and the public ahead of Storm Burt was that, quote, significant flooding was possible across Wales and to be prepared, end quote.

NRW says it's going to review what happened, including those trigger levels.

Now, would you share a fork with a friend?

A glass of water, maybe?

Perhaps something stronger?

Well, what what about a share of the hundreds of billions of vital microbes that live in your gut?

Many of these microbes can be traced back to our biological mothers, but a recent study published in the journal Nature that analyzed the microbes of nearly 2,000 people in Honduras revealed that your mother isn't the only person you share a gut ecosystem or microbiome as it's known with.

According to the study, our friends and their friends can shape the bacteria, fungi and yeast that teams inside our guts.

Joining me to discuss this is gut health scientist from King's College London, Dr.

Megan Rossi.

Hi, Megan, welcome to the programme.

It's an absolute pleasure.

Can you remind me briefly, why is our microbiome, this ecosystem in our gut, why is it so important?

It is a game changer in terms of human health.

So these microbes are doing things like communicating to our brain, our appetite regulation, different hormones.

So pretty much whatever your health goal is, the science is saying that targeting your microbiome could actually be a really smart way to kind of go about that.

Right.

And I can sort of understand the process by which we inherit some of that and then our lifestyle affects how that's shaped and programmed.

But who are we sharing our microbiome with and why?

Well based on this new paper, actually anyone we're in contact with apparently.

So it might sound a little bit daunting, but you know, the science shows that absolutely your partner is going to be the strongest person you're going to share the microbes with.

In fact, a really cool study showed that every intimate kiss that we have with our partner, we share 80 million microbes.

But of course, this new research is highlighting it is not just people we are directly sharing saliva with, actually, people we might not be in direct contact with.

We also could be sharing microbes with them.

How is that transfer happening?

Is that just about sort of sharing contact, eating together, drinking together, that sort of thing?

So that's one of the main mechanisms.

So saliva, not only, you know, obviously the kissing, but whether you're using similar forks or, you know, drinking from the same glass, but also droplets.

So if you're talking to someone, you might not even know they kind of go very very small and they can transfer microbes that way but then we get a level deeper and it's shared surfaces so you know if you're on the tube or on the bus and you're holding the handle you're going to share microbes that way and then even a deeper level we we know that there is millions microbes floating in the air and they can kind of create these spores where they go dormant and go to sleep but then if they land on someone then they waken up and that's probably what we're seeing via this new paper in nature as to one of the key mechanisms of how we're sharing with people that we're not necessarily in direct contact with.

This study in Nature was done in relatively isolated villages in Honduras.

You know would the same apply in terms of how that microbiome is shared if you were living in a big city?

So the percentage will absolutely change.

So in that particular study they showed that within the villages the average person, even if they weren't in direct contact, shared around 4% of their microbes at the strain level.

Whereas if you were living in the same household with your partner, it was around 14%.

So we think some of these bigger cities, so although it's unlikely to be the 4% with everyone in Manchester or Birmingham or London, it's likely that depending on like your travel.

So if you're a commuter, probably, you know, you're going to share at least four, maybe 6% of your microbes with those that you tend to travel with on the train most days.

Whereas if someone's more in their car, then they're less likely to kind of have that shared connection.

There's also, you pointed to it, how important this is.

There's a growing body of evidence about our microbiome and how it affects our health.

Do we know how sharing microbes can affect our shared health?

Look, it's very early stages in terms of what does this actually mean in terms of things like non-communicable disease risks and things like that.

We do certainly know that people who were in communities, they seem to have similar or higher risks of things like mental health if their colleagues had that as well as weight management issues.

And we thought that was just down to shared behaviours and environments and families, you know, genetic elements.

But actually, this new research is suggesting, well, actually, maybe this is another mechanism that kind of might predispose us to a small percentage to gaining some of these non-communicable diseases.

Fascinating.

It seems to kind of play into every aspect of our lives.

You even talked about our mental health there.

Should we be thinking about the microbiome of people we're sharing our space and our saliva with?

No, I think we don't want to get worried about, oh my God, we don't want to catch that microbe from someone.

And actually, we can put a positive spin on this people who are exposed to more different you know environments different people actually seem to have a more diverse range of microbes microbial diversity has been associated with lower risk of different chronic conditions as we mentioned and the other point I think to highlight is that very few microorganisms like the bacteria are actually inherently bag a lot of them actually can be quite beneficial.

It comes down to how we treat them.

So you can have identical bacteria in one person's gut and the exact same bacteria falls into someone else's microbiome.

and those bacteria act very very different so I want people to you know in a way feel empowered that even if you do transmit some of these microbes you are ultimately in control of how you treat these microbes and how you can kind of make them be good for you in a way so how should we be treating our microbes what's what's your sort of microbiome care advice for listeners Yeah, it sounds really simple, but the number one predictor at the moment in terms of the research is eating as many different types of whole plants as possible.

So think about whatever you're having for dinner tonight and how can you add a can of mixed beans in it?

Could be bolognese, could be some takeaway.

Again, add a tin in.

They're about, you know, 70p.

So really accessible sources of these prebiotic fibers, which literally fertilise the microbiome.

It's fascinating, Megan.

Thank you so much.

But before I let you go, can I just ask a quick question?

So

I do share a lot of kisses and cuddles, I've got to admit, with my dog.

I am basically just his emotional slave.

Do I share a microbiome with Herbert?

You absolutely do share your microbes with Herbert.

But don't worry.

No, no.

The science actually suggests that people who, you know, have pets, particularly furry pets that they kind of cozy up to, actually have a lower risk of certain conditions like allergies and actually are more resilient generally to other non-communicable diseases.

So actually, Herbert's looking after you.

Excellent.

He's getting extra cuddles tonight, whether he likes it or not, all in the name of microbiome care.

Megan Rossi, thank you very much indeed.

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ServePro, like it never even happened.

Thank you to Megan Rossi, and you're listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

The first international plastics treaty that aims to tackle the global scourge of plastic pollution is about to be finalised at crucial UN talks that are now taking place in Busan in South Korea.

Plastic production is at an all-time high.

In the 1950s, the world produced about 2 million tonnes of new plastic each year.

Now we're making more than 400 million tonnes annually, according to the UN.

And that is a huge problem.

One of the solutions is to make all of those wrappers, coffee cup lids, bottles and packaging out of other alternative materials.

Anyone who's an avid viewer of anything David Attenborough presents will know that we've been aware of the plastic waste problem for a long time.

So why haven't any new bioplastics, materials that break down and don't float in the ocean or persist for centuries in the environment, taken off yet?

Professor Steve Fletcher, whose research focuses on plastic pollution, is in Busan at the moment and he joins me from there now.

Hi, Steve.

Yeah, hi, Victoria.

Hello.

Thank you so much for joining us from a very different different time zone.

How are things in Busan?

Well the negotiations are ongoing.

I've just left the conference hall actually.

Things are going a little bit slowly at the moment, but the chair of the negotiations is pushing forward some ways to speed up the discussions to try and get agreement by the end of Sunday.

Right, right.

These things are never straightforward.

But on the issue of plastics specifically, why are there no widely available plastic alternatives?

It's an interesting question because, of course, there are loads of alternatives to plastics.

You know, we're totally familiar with wood and glass and cotton and paper, and these are traditional alternatives to plastics.

In terms of biomaterials, there are some challenges with the scaling up of the use.

Often, the properties of those materials are not quite so good as the plastics that we rely on these days.

The production costs can be higher, and perhaps most significantly with bioplastics.

They tend not to sort of work in a system that's set up for fossil fuel derived plastics.

Why don't they work?

What's the big difference there that makes them less functional?

Well, the challenge probably is that waste management systems are set up for fossil fuel derived plastics.

So if some biomaterials or bioplastics are mixed in with conventional plastics, then neither of them can be recycled particularly well.

And there's a real kind of barrier to entry for new materials into the existing resource systems that we use.

And it's a real problem, actually, for new materials coming into the market.

So barriers to entry and the fact that we've got a system set up to make what we're already making, but is it particularly difficult to recreate some of plastic's very useful properties?

in a material that doesn't persist for as long in the environment as plastic does?

Well, there's two different things there.

So there are bioplastics, and bioplastic is derived from a biological source, whereas a conventional plastic is derived from a fossil fuel source.

And so many of the challenges that are associated with conventional plastics are also associated with bioplastics in terms of degrading into microplastics and generating a legacy of pollution.

With biodegradable plastics, which are not the same thing, despite sounding quite similar, after their useful life has ended they will biodegrade in certain conditions and one of the challenges with biodegradable plastics is that often people will put them in their compost heap at home

because you know people would assume based on the labeling that they would be able to just go into their compost heap and degrade there but of course that isn't always the case quite often the level of compostability of those plastics can only really be achieved if they're in some form of industrial composting unit at much higher temperatures or higher pressures,

it's almost frustrating, isn't it, to kind of talk about just how the system seems to play into the ubiquity of the thing that's causing the problem.

You know, we're really kind of in this spiral.

But are there new materials in development that you think are genuinely exciting, possible replacement substitutes and that are more sustainable than plastic?

Yeah, well, there are loads of materials being developed.

There's materials made from fungi, from algae, from seaweed, and even artificial spider silk.

But the critical question underpinning all of these is that sometimes there's always a risk that they might be worse for the environment than the plastic they're replacing.

So we need to do quite a comprehensive analysis of the pros and cons of all of these materials, really, and then make a judgment as to what is the most appropriate material to use.

And it's not, you know, as you touched on there, it's not necessarily a plastic problem.

it's a throwing things away problem, it's a it's a sort of waste stream problem.

And that's what the talks in Bissana are trying to deal with.

What are some key things that that plastic pollution agreement will have to deal with in order to tackle that problem?

Yeah, well, the agreement, if it is agreed later this week, what it ideally needs to address is the continuing growth of plastic production in a situation where the world's waste systems just simply can't cope with it.

The volume of plastic being produced is just so great.

No amount of recycling or incineration or any of our sort of current go-to solutions is going to work.

So what we're really looking for are solutions across the entire life cycle of plastics.

So reducing the level of plastic entering the economy.

So what people talk about is turning down the tap a little bit.

We then look to phase out plastics that we don't need or that are toxic.

We could look at the plastic that is essential and try and reuse it as much as possible.

So what we're really looking at is a circular economy of plastics where the material is valued rather than just seen as cheap waste.

And because it has value, it will leak out of the economy much less as pollution because we will value it much more.

And from the perspective of someone who's watching the talks in Bissan, do you feel like we can get there?

Oh, gosh.

I mean, that's a really tricky question right now.

We're just finishing day four out of seven, and right now it's on a knife edge, I would say.

Yes, I mean, if we can make some rapid progress in the next 24 hours, then maybe, but it's going to be really tight, I think, to damp right down to the deadline.

Right.

Well, I hope you managed to get some sleep and do keep us posted from Busan.

But for now, Steve Fletcher from the University of Portsmouth.

Thank you very much indeed.

Yeah, thank you.

Now, was it a good cop or a bad COP?

Before the UN climate conference started, Inside Science presenter Marnie Chesterton talked to a panel of climate science and geopolitical experts to ask: are climate summits working?

One of those experts was Mark Maslin.

And now that the Baku conference is over, I caught up with Mark to see if his predictions came true.

So for me, the COP wasn't successful at all.

And the way I sum it up is that China stepped up, we had the USA saying goodbye, India didn't even turn up, and of course, Saudi Arabia tried to wreck the party.

So, what we had was a real mixture of geopolitics, and of course, we were holding it in a country where the president said during the COP meeting that oil and gas were a gift from God, which really didn't set up the negotiations in a good way.

And so, I would say overall, it was a failure because the money that we were expecting to be produced by developing countries for the least developed countries to actually get them to shift to renewable energy just wasn't forthcoming.

So, that's that's the money and not much progress.

On the panel programme, when you spoke to Mani, you also spoke about how last year in Dubai, a big headline was that countries agreed for the first time the need to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.

That's critical, isn't it?

Was that built on at all in Baku?

No, and what was interesting is Saudi Arabia tried to, as I said, wreck the party.

They were trying to make sure that that statement from the United Arab Emirates last year was not included in the final statement.

Now, what was interesting is the President of COP

actually did a balancing act.

So it is mentioned by document number and by paragraph number in the final statement, but the words fossil fuel does not appear in the final statement that came out of Baku.

Goodness me, the wording of individual paragraphs and the sort of grappling with language, it can really kind of make this into a confusing headache, doesn't it?

In terms of the science of how we get closer to getting the trajectory of keeping warming under two degrees Celsius, in terms of fixing the problem.

Did Baku get us any closer there?

I don't think Baku actually got us any closer.

If you look at the previous statements from, say, Dubai, it clearly states we need to reduce carbon emissions to the atmosphere by 45% globally by 2030.

And then we have to hit net zero by 2050.

So nothing in Baku made that any more likely, particularly as the 300 billion that's promised to help the least developed countries move to renewable energy doesn't have to finally turn up in total until 2035.

I mean, it doesn't sound very positive.

Markets, it's coming into the Christmassy holiday season.

Is there anything positive to say

from this year's COP?

China, I said China stepped up.

China said their emissions will peak by 2030.

All the estimations are that it will peak next year and then will start to drop.

Now that's four years early, which is fantastic news.

There were some really interesting deals on dealing with methane from waste around the world, which 30 countries signed up for.

We're also then looking forward to say COP 30 in Brazil, particularly as next year will be the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, where the leaders of the world actually said we will limit global warming to two degrees with an aspiration of one and a half degrees.

And then what we've been trying to do over the last 10 years is work out how do we actually do it.

Baku did not help with that but I'm hoping that the interim discussions and of course the discussions in Brazil will start to accelerate action again.

I mean, you did also speak in the panel programme about how terrible the coffee and food was at the Copenhagen COP, which is important for keeping people going as they try and last through these negotiations.

Was at least the food and coffee better in Azerbaijan?

So I have to say the organization of the COP 29 in Baku was great.

It was very well organised.

It was all very well set out.

It was very easy to move around.

The food was okay.

It was actually not too bad, the coffee was okay.

The only problem that we found was finding vegetarian food, which wasn't just eggs, was a major issue.

Okay, but at least the coffee and the organisation was good.

Let's leave it on that slightly positive note.

Mark Maslin, thank you very much indeed.

Thank you.

And that is all we have time for this week.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

The producers were Sophie Ormiston, Gerry Holt, and Ella Hubber.

Technical production was by Searle Whitney, and the show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science, and follow the links to the Open University.

Now I'm off to cuddle the dog in the name of my gut health, but I will be back with you next week.

So until then, thanks for listening and bye-bye.

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