Scotland’s resilience capabilities are to be boosted by a new national centre in Dumfries that will help improve responses to issues such as flooding.

The new centre, situated at Crichton Campus, will also act as a national hub; coordinating work to understand how best communities and local emergency responders can prepare for an anticipated increase in natural hazard events as a result of climate change.

The centre will look to support and help coordinate:

• Further improvement in Scotland’s resilience to natural hazards such as severe weather and flooding, augmenting existing systems and complement work of partners such as Adaptation Scotland
• Building community resilience across Scotland, learning from existing good practice across the South of Scotland
• Improvement in the protection and resilience of Scotland’s communities to flooding
• Development of Scotland’s resilience research capability
• Provision of resilience training and development opportunities and ensuring the identification and sharing of good practice
• Improvement in local multi-agency resilience arrangements and evaluation of the benefits to responders of investment in flood warning technology in the region

Partners in the ambitious and wide-ranging project include Dumfries and Galloway Council, Met Office, SEPA and emergency response organisations such as Police Scotland and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service as well as the Scottish Funding Council and the Crichton Trust.

The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) is leading work to harness the research capacity on resilience across Scotland. They will support development of a new Research Centre of Excellence for Scotland by leading a workshop involving academia, the Met Office, industry and other stakeholders. A panel will assess a proposal from a consortium prior to any Funding Council award.

SFC has also agreed in principle to fund two additional posts based at Crichton to help support the Research Centre of Excellence.

Commenting on the announcement, Scottish Environment and Climate Change Minister, Paul Wheelhouse, said:

“We know that human activity is changing the global climate and extreme weather events are more common than they were previously. Scotland will not be immune and we are already seeing evidence of Scotland’s climate changing. With extreme weather events predicted to become more frequent, it is of the utmost importance that we are as prepared as possible to respond when these hit which is why we have put well developed resilience arrangements in place to help minimise their impacts.”

He added that the facilities at Crichton Campus would provide an excellent opportunity for resilience partners, academia and the Scottish Government to work collaboratively on climate and flooding related resilience issues and to optimise multi-agency working.

Dumfries and Galloway Council has been recognised nationally as having some of the best emergency planning arrangements in Britain. Its team has been asked to provide advice to other regions and agencies who have experienced emergency situations disruptive events including the recent flooding in Somerset.