Once more unto the breach, dear friends, that is the government’s cuts to flood and coastal defence spending. I need your help to reveal the impact the cuts will have on new defences because, as it stands, just weeks from the new financial year, no one knows.

Below, I’ll relate the farcical example of the funding for the proposed coastal defences in Felixstowe town and how the Prime Minister, David Cameron, appears to be more worried by flooding abroad than at home. But first let’s consider the byzantine and opaque way in which defence projects get the go-ahead.

Life is too short to go into the details here, but in brief the Environment Agency sends a list of “indicative allocations” to the relevant regional committees, suggesting the possible funding outcomes for proposed projects. Many of these projects have had years of preparatory work done and boast cost-benefit ratios of 5-to-1 or better. What follows the sending of the lists is lots of back and forth before the EA board decides which projects get funded.

The EA says it will complete all defences under construction but that fewer new projects will start because of the government cuts. (The government says the cuts are 8%, everyone else says 27%).

So I want to see the lists of the projects being considered and then see which ones fail to get funded in March. The EA indicative allocation lists are not secret, but neither can the EA give them to me. I have asked again and will make a request under the Freedom of Information Act if needed. Watch this space.

In the meantime, if you live in an area at risk of flooding or of coastal erosion and there is a proposal for new defences that has yet to be funded, I need your help. Please add a mention of it in the comments below and put a few extra details into the form at the end of this post. I’ll then be able to highlight projects that go unfunded following the cuts.

And so to Felixstowe. The town section of the sea defences has in places a “zero-year” lifespan, according to analysis by engineers Mott MacDonald. As seafront resident, Paul Marsh, told me: “You can see it crumbling before your eyes. If we got the wrong weather something very bad could happen very quickly.”

After 10 years of investigations, the planned £10m scheme to rebuild the defense was dropped from the EA’s indicative list on the 23 December. Now, after a huge local outcry, it is back on the list. “It’s like a yo-yo,” said Marsh, adding that the stress caused by the uncertainty and the unfathomable process is huge.

The EA told me: “Prior to publication of the draft allocations, we reviewed all schemes nationally. Felixstowe was removed, however following further discussions with Defra on funding guidance, we were able to reinstate it.”

Like Marsh, Labour’s shadow environment secretary Mary Creagh is unhappy about the uncertainty:

“The government is being shockingly complacent about the impact of a 27% cut to flood defence spending. Homeowners and businesses want certainty about flood defence schemes not more delays about which projects will get funding or not.

“Labour increased flood defence funding each year by more than inflation following the 2007 floods. It is imperative for the Government to reassure the public that they are taking the necessary steps to provide flood protection for everyone, especially in vulnerable areas.”

There have been recent terrible floods in Australia, Brazil and Sri Lanka, and the prime minister rightly sent his condolences to prime minister Julia Gillard and president Dilma Roussef.

Both the prime minister and his enviroment secretary Caroline Spelman agree that the risk of flooding is rising due to global warming, in the UK and elsewhere. Yet, while claiming to protect flood defence spending, they have driven through cuts and then tried to spin the result as “broadly the same“.

In my opinion, that is not acceptable and I hope you will help me document the impact of those actions.

Blog by Damian Carrington on the guardian.co.uk website

Hickling Broad is the largest of the Norfolk Broads and is at threat from sea-level rise. Patrick Barkham’s statement that “local environmental groups such as the Norfolk Wildlife Trust have spoken hopefully of valuable new salt water habitats if this part of the Broads is submerged” does not represent our view (Waves of destruction, April 17). We own and manage Hickling Broad and are deeply concerned about its future.

Read the full article on the Guardian comment is free website

When it comes to coastal erosion (Waves of destruction, G2, April 17), unlike most other European countries we don’t have a solidarity fund to compensate people for such natural disasters, and so the last owner is expected to pay when their house is demolished.

To stop a perverse game of beggar-my-neighbour where the unscrupulous try to sell to unsuspecting buyers, we should be leasing such coastal properties from the sea. Any land that is likely to disappear within a century would in effect become leasehold and the time left stated on the title deeds. In addition to a solidarity fund, limited compensation could be paid if such estimates proved to be wrong. The British Geological Survey, which already undertakes coastal surveys, could provide fairly reliable estimates revised every decade for places with cliffs like Happisburgh. This would be rather more problematic further south along the Norfolk coast since a major breach to this narrow barrier could happen any time this century.

Once breached, the northern Norfolk broads and several villages would be lost, and so a proper cost/benefit analysis is urgently required. Coastal defences would interfere with the movement of sediment down the east coast of England and have to be balanced against any likely impacts further down the coast.

David Nowell
Fellow, Geological Society

Earlier this week 57 Knipe Point Drive was a two-bedroom bungalow on a clifftop estate worth about £150,000. This morning the house is probably worth next to nothing, even though it boasts a new sea view extending for miles over the woodland and shingle of National Trust-owned Cayton Bay on the Yorkshire coast.

Diggers have demolished two bungalows that stood between number 57 and the cliff edge. The move prevented the houses following in the wake of their well-kept gardens and patios, which plunged 30 metres into the bay below, leaving the hamlet one of the most precarious in the UK. Dramatic landslips caused by unexplained water saturation in the cliff have claimed about seven metres of land at Knipe Point over the past month, and demolition has created a gap in the lines of bright white homes that were worth a total of around £9m.

Read the full story by Fay Schlesinger on the Guardian website

“We must be pragmatic about the forthcoming environmental challenges, which is why Natural England is undertaking groundbreaking research

“Society needs to face up to the stark realities of climate change. We are locked into unavoidable changes for at least the next 50 years; we all know that, not least because all of us have had it drummed into us over the past few years. It’s when the examples start to filter through into people’s lives that reality hits.

“Natural England is leading on groundbreaking research to assess the potential impact that climate change may have on England’s natural environment. Our research in the Norfolk Broads is just the beginning of the journey, as we learn how to help our wildlife adapt to the impact of climate change at a landscape scale.”

Read the full article by Martin Doughty on the Guardian “comment is free” Website

It was the latest in a series of catastrophic floods. Seawater forced its way through sand dunes and spilled miles across the low-lying lands of north-east Norfolk, spoiling farmland and destroying homes. After this flood of 1622, it was proposed that the sea be allowed in for good, as far as the village of Potter Heigham, five miles from the coast. Local people and landowners were horrified. They vowed to defend their livelihoods. Two thousand men were press-ganged into repairing the dunes and repelling “the extordinaire force and rage of the Sea”.

The strategy worked and the waves were turned away from this corner of Norfolk for nearly 400 years. Last month, however, a new plan, closely resembling the retreat first proposed in the 17th century, was leaked to the public. Calling for “the embayment” of 25 square miles of low-lying land, the government’s environmental body, Natural England, said that nine miles of sea defences between the seaside villages of Eccles and Winterton were unsustainable “beyond the next 20-50 years”, creating the possibility of “realigning the coast”. What this cold academic language actually means is wiping part of Norfolk off the map: 600 homes, six villages, five medieval churches, four fresh-water Broadland lakes, historic windmills, precious nature reserves and valuable agricultural land would be given up to the rising seas. Britain would have its first climate change refugees.

Rising seas are changing Britain’s coast dramatically. Norfolk is the first low-lying area to face a stark and cruel new choice – plough millions into doomed defences, or abandon whole villages to the invading waters. Read the full story by Patrick Barkham on the Guardian website