Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of how artificial intelligence could be used to protect against droughts and floods, particularly in relation to managing water storage systems.

It is vital that water companies also embrace new technologies to manage their water systems, such as the use of artificial intelligence to help detect leaks.

The Environment Agency and its partners are assessing how new technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can improve how they assess, manage and communicate flood risk, including:

• Trials to understand how machine learning (ML) approaches can link historic flood data to forecast flood impacts, whilst the development of generative artificial intelligence may improve targeted flood warnings.
• AI is being trialled in the administration of reports submitted by reservoir supervising engineers.
• Projects being delivered under the £200 million flood and coastal innovation programmes (FCIP) are piloting the use of AI and ML to provide improved local flood resilience.
• AI being explored in flood asset management, that will enable predictive maintenance to anticipate failures before they occur.