A time of change

As the United Kingdom leaves the European Union, much legislation has to be enacted to implement national policy on issues that for over 40 years have been determined through our membership of the EU; these areas include agricultural and environmental policy. In agriculture this means moving from an era of subsidies under the EU common agricultural policy to one which is described as “public money for public goods” (UK Government, 2020). Flooding is a societal risk, as opposed to an individual risk where there is choice in accepting the potential for harm to be experienced, thus flood risk management is a public good. In the words of the Agriculture Bill currently before Parliament “The Secretary of State may give financial assistance for … (e) managing land or water in a way that prevents, reduces or protects from environmental hazards …”; it is clear this can include measures to reduce flooding. A similar philosophy of public money leading to public good can be seen in the desire from many national and international research funders for a move to open access (OA) publishing of the science they promote. OA publication makes publically funded research openly and freely available to others. There is a continuing growth in the number of academic journals and papers that have embraced the open access model of publication where access to knowledge is without charge. As an online only publication all our content is accessed electronically either directly through our web address or by referral from internet search engines. On August 8th, 2019, the Journal of Flood Risk Management started the transition from a hybrid publication (where authors could pay for a paper to have OA), to a gold open access publication where all papers are now open access to all to read, download, and share. All manuscripts submitted from this date are subject to an Article Publication Charge (APC) if accepted and published in the Journal, and will be published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence that permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. Moreover, from January 1st, 2020 Wiley has provided OA to all previous issues of the Journal; thus all content in the Journal is now freely available to read, download, and share. The move to OA is a significant development for the Journal and responds to trends in searching for and access to knowledge; it produces benefits and some challenges for our authors. The benefits of OA publication include a more rapid assignment of a paper to an issue (done four times a year) and free access which will encourage wider readership, use of the paper, and potentially citation and recognition. The principal challenge we foresee is that most authors will need to fund their publication, either directly or through an established arrangement between Wiley and an agency or institution with a Wiley Open Access Account where the APC is paid by the institution or funder. For example, applicable to authors in many German institutions, Wiley has negotiated an agreement with Projekt DEAL which covers the cost of publication following successful peer review. Wiley also has a schedule of waivers and discounts by country, full details of the APC are set out on the appropriate page Journal website11 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/1753318x/homepage/article-publication-charges and the links it contains. As I prepare this editorial, the Met Office (2020) has issued a press release confirming that globally the decade from 2010 to 2019 has been the warmest on record and also the past 5 years have been the warmest in the 170-year series. This confirms the provisional assessment in the report United in Science (WMO, 2019) of the Science Advisory Group to UN Climate Action Summit 2019 (COP25). United in Science is a synthesis of the key findings from several more detailed reports on recent work undertaken by major partner organisations in the domain of global climate change research such as those of observations by the WMO and analysis of climate projection in the IPCC Special Reports. In his Foreword to United in Science, António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General, states “Climate change is the defining challenge of our time”. In terms of observations, the WMO documents continued loss of sea ice and ice mass, and an acceleration in rate of rise of mean sea level. Coastal and fluvial flooding are amongst the reasons for concern, and, impacts and risks identified from the IPCC Special Reports for selected natural, managed, and human systems. At the currently observed 1°C of warming from pre-industrial temperatures, changes in both fluvial and coastal risks are detectable and attributable to climate change; however, for coastal flooding the impacts are more certain in their attribution than for fluvial flooding. Over the past decade 40 papers published in JFRM (out of over 600) have listed climate change in the keywords and there is one more in this current issue on non-stationary flood frequency analysis (Faulkner, Warren, Spencer, & Sharkey, 2020). I would welcome more submissions that contribute knowledge and understanding to this defining challenge of our time and it is the Editorial Board's intention to seek a definitive review paper on this topic. Inevitably flood risk management strategies, policies, and practice will focus on adaptation to the changes already in progress in the climatic and meteorological forcing of the flooding system from the observed 1°C of global warming. However, such adaptation in each country will take place in a wider social, economic, and environmental context which will differ internationally; at the Journal of Flood Risk Management our multidisciplinary character, and now its open access publication, makes it an ideal forum for exploring and sharing the complexity of such issues and seeking a sustainable path forwards. As we move to open access, we are committed to maintain our standards for acceptance of manuscripts and also to improve our turnaround of reviews and decisions. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome Professor Andrew Binns of the University of Guelph in Canada and Dr Karin de Bruijn of Deltares in the Netherlands as Associate Editors and also welcome the 11 new editors who have recently joined our editorial panel. Finally I would like to thank all of our peer reviewers who voluntarily give their time and advice and without whom it would not be possible to publish the Journal of Flood Risk Management.

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