Drones for flood response (update) - Environment agency

The Environment Agency (EA), an early adopter of drone solutions, continues to operate a 24/7, 365, 6-hour flood response service from drone vendor RUAS. Since 2021, EA has succeeded in substantially increasing its number of in-house pilots, developed additional use cases and transitioned drones from a project-based approach to business as usual. The main growth challenges faced by EA are internal rather than external.

The Environment Agency (EA) was among the first government entities to recognise the potential of drones, working with vendors for their 24/7, 365-days-a-year, 6-hour flood response service since 2017. While this crucial service remains operational, the EA has further leveraged drone technology by training an increasing number of their existing staff as drone pilots. This has led to exciting new applications, such as culvert inspections, and other applications like water sampling are currently being explored. In 2024, the EA plans to transition from a project-based approach to integrating drones into their routine operations. To achieve their ambitions, the EA will need to address their primary challenges, which are mostly internal, such as IT and software issues. This contrasts with other organisations, where challenges often revolve around external regulatory constraints from entities like the CAA.

EA believes that potential barriers to growth have remained unchanged from 2021 to 2024 (all trends flat, see below). This is an unusual take, as most other respondents have at least one change.

^{_{The 2024 colour indicator shown is based on Environment agency’s current perception of the associated barrier (red indicates an 'issue' and green 'no issue'). The trend shows the degree to which they feel this barrier has changed since 2021. To see a summary of how this organisation's views compare to others, see the chart on page 8 of our main report.}}

This reflects EA’s view that Perception, Implementation, Technology and Skills did not hinder their drone deployments in 2021 and continue to pose no issues, a refreshing perspective.

While the EA currently considers their Implementation of drones to be in the green, it is important to note that the expansion of drone use cases and increased frequency will result in a corresponding increase in data volume. Consequently, software capabilities for drones and integration with existing systems will need to be enhanced. As noted above, this is a significant internal challenge for EA but not one which they perceive as a barrier to growth.

The Technology and Skills categories are also green, reflecting the scope of use cases and the way EA has embraced a hybrid model which combines internal and external drone operations. They note that the CAA’s proposed 4 levels of drone operator qualifications will have a positive impact on Skills going forward, and:

However, the Regulation category remains amber due to the current Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) situation. The EA believes that “close” BVLOS (flying behind nearby objects) would be most beneficial for them in the short term. They think BVLOS would also be beneficial for services they would most likely purchase from specialist drone vendors such as: