FloodAction Coalition is scaling nature-based solutions to flood and drought, mobilising land and asset owners, insurers, investors and technical expertise to build a market for investable, large-scale climate resilience.
FloodAction at a glance
Insurers and investors are backing a UK coalition to turn rising flood costs into resilience-linked returns — helping to protect communities, restore nature and build the UK’s water resilience across flood, drought and water quality.
Who: Convened by The Conduit and chaired by Aviva, the FloodAction Coalition brings together the landowners, infrastructure operators, insurers, financiers, environmental NGOs, water utilities, legal and advisory partners, and government agencies — uniting the full value chain needed to deliver water resilience at scale.
What: The coalition is developing the UK’s first investment market for natural flood and drought resilience — unlocking private and public capital to build large-scale, investable portfolios of nature-based projects, with the first £150m pipeline of projects coming online in 2026.
Why: To scale green infrastructure that protects homes and communities from floods and drought, safeguards critical assets, and delivers lasting co-benefits for nature, climate and local economies — building a £1 billion+ resilience market by 2028.
Flooding is one of the UK’s fastest-growing climate risks (2). Across Europe, economic losses from climate-related extremes have surged in recent years — averaging more than €40 billion annually between 2020 and 2023, nearly three times the long-term average (3). In the UK, annual flood damages already exceed £6 billion each year through damage to property, infrastructure and business disruption, while insurers are signaling that without stronger resilience measures, some areas may become increasingly difficult to protect. Climate-driven losses are straining the global reinsurance market, prompting a tightening of risk appetite and a rise in the cost of protection — with implications for affordability and resilience across the insurance value chain. Protecting homes and rebuilding natural defences is now as urgent as managing the financial risk.
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FloodAction Coalition believes there is a better way. By turning Natural Flood Management (NFM) into a new class of investable infrastructure, the coalition aims to flip the equation; moving from a growing cost base to a scalable, cost-effective nature-based solution with measurable financial, social and environmental returns.
Natural Flood Management (NFM) interventions — including woodland restoration, leaky dams and catchment re-wetting — have been shown to attenuate flood peaks, slow water movement and increase catchment water storage. In pilot catchments across the UK, reductions of up to 10–30 % in peak flows have been observed, and NFM measures often deliver equivalent outcomes at roughly half the cost of engineered defences, while also offering biodiversity, carbon and water-quality co-benefits (4). What has been missing is a financial structure to reward and replicate this impact at scale.
FloodAction Coalition aims to unlock that solution — creating a market where insurers, investors and asset holders co-fund NFM, model downstream risk reduction and generate resilience-linked returns by bringing together both demand and supply. For landowners, participation can offer long-term income streams, enhanced land value and improve recognition for delivering public resilience benefits. For communities and civil society, it creates a route to be actively involved in co-designing solutions that help to protect homes and restore local environments while also supporting economic development.
The FloodAction Coalition will create new pathways to:
- Mobilise blended public–private finance aligned with ESG and TNFD (Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures) principles, developing investable mechanisms for measurable, resilience-linked returns
- Enable insurers to reduce portfolio risk through natural resilience — helping keep homes protected and insurance affordabl
- Support infrastructure asset holders to cut exposure to floods, droughts and water stress — reducing disruption and avoiding rising climate-related cost
- Protect communities and critical infrastructure from floods, droughts and water disruption — ensuring safety, reliability and continuity of essential services.
- Deliver direct benefits for communities — from lower insurance costs and reduced flood impacts to restored local environments, greener spaces and stronger local economies.
- Achieve tangible, lasting environmental gains from restored catchments, healthier soils, improved water quality and revitalised ecosystems.
The Coalition is now identifying ‘opportunity clusters’ — places where asset holders facing water-resilience challenges align with landowners ready to deliver effective Natural Flood Management solutions. These clusters will form the foundation for portfolios of NFM projects, bringing together demand and supply within the same catchment. FloodAction supports both sides of the market — incubating projects, de-risking early development and working closely with nature-based solution developers to move investment from concept to implementation. FloodAction is also developing flexible financing structures that blend public and private capital to de-risk early investment and enable projects to scale. Each project will draw on a stacked revenue model, combining multiple sources of value — from flood protection and water-quality improvements to carbon sequestration and biodiversity gains. This approach allows different buyers, from insurers to infrastructure owners and government, to pay for the outcomes most relevant to them, creating investable portfolios that reward measurable resilience and environmental performance.
Being launched in the UK — a global hub for green finance and innovation (5) — the FloodAction Coalition is building the frameworks for a market that can make nature infrastructure-grade at scale. With one in four homes across England now facing some level of flood risk (2), the need for a systemic resilience market has never been clearer.
Sources
(1) Public First, From Risk to Resilience, 2025
(2) Aviva
(3) European Environment Agency
(4) Environment Agency here and here
(5) UK Government
[Main image credit: Heather Gunn / shutterstock.com]