UEL to lead flood defence study backed by Royal Society
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Published
21 August 2025
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The University of East London has secured funding from the Royal Society to lead an ambitious international research project that could transform how coastlines are protected from extreme flooding.
The two-year study is being delivered in partnership with the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo and will explore how nature-based solutions (NBS) - such as wetlands, coastal forests and grazing marshes - can be integrated into traditional engineered flood defences to prevent erosion and reduce the risk of failure.
Project lead Dr Ravindra Jayaratne, Reader in Coastal Engineering and Chartered Civil Engineer in the School of Architecture, Computing and Engineering, will travel to Japan later this month to kick off the initiative, which is supported by the Royal Society’s International (Bi-lateral) Exchanges programme. The project places UEL at the forefront of international research into sustainable coastal resilience.
“Securing Royal Society funding is a major milestone for us,” says Dr Jayaratne. “It reflects the growing recognition that UEL is a serious player in engineering research with international reach and real-world impact.”
As climate change and seismic activity increase the frequency of tsunamis and violent storms, coastal structures around the world are being tested like never before. The biggest threat is often what happens underneath: powerful waves scour away the soil and sand at the base of seawalls and coastal dikes, leading to collapse.
While scour has been studied extensively in traditional “hard” engineering contexts, very little is known about how combining these structures with natural features could improve their performance. That’s the gap this new project aims to fill.
“Sea levels are rising, storms are intensifying, and hard coastal infrastructure alone can’t keep up,” says Dr Jayaratne.
This research is about using what nature already does well - slowing water, anchoring soil, absorbing energy - and embedding that into modern flood defences.”
Dr Jayaratne and his team will study four coastal locations - two in the UK (including the Wash in East Anglia) and two in Japan (Miyagi and Shizuoka prefectures) - each of which has different natural features in place.
Using terrestrial laser scanning and field surveys, the team will gather high-resolution data to build lab-scale models of these locations. These will then be tested in UEL’s wave flume and Waseda University’s tsunami basin, simulating real-world flooding scenarios to observe how hybrid defences perform under pressure.
“We’ll be able to see, in real time, how nature-based features interact with floodwaters and protect the structures behind them,” says Dr Jayaratne. “That kind of insight is rare - and it’s crucial for future urban planning.”
The new project builds on Dr Jayaratne’s previous Royal Society collaboration with the University of Michigan, which looked at tsunami-induced seawall failure. That initiative, ran from 2021 to 2024, involved joint experiments at UEL and Michigan, and led to the creation of two new PhD research posts.
The new UK-Japan study will take this research further by exploring how hybrid solutions - combining nature with infrastructure - could change how coastal engineering is taught, practised and regulated.
“This work could shift how engineers and policymakers around the world think about coastal protection,” says Dr Jayaratne. “Nature-based solutions don’t just reduce scour - they bring added benefits like biodiversity, carbon storage and better public access to natural spaces. That’s a powerful combination.”
Joining Dr Jayaratne on the field trip to Japan are Dr Jack Clough, Research Fellow at UEL’s Sustainability Research Institute (SRI), and Dr Takahito Mikami, an Associate Professor at Waseda University. Together, they will collect comprehensive field data and begin a novel set of lab experiments at Waseda’s pneumatic-type large-scale 3D tsunami basin.
The results will feed into potential updates to international coastal defence design standards, with broader applications for policymakers, planners and environmental regulators.
“Coastal defence is no longer just an engineering issue - it’s environmental, social, economic,” says Dr Jayaratne. “By bringing together diverse interdisciplinary expertise and working across borders, we can design smarter, safer, more sustainable solutions for the challenges ahead.”