As autumn blurs into winter, the news is once again filling up with a familiar story: overflowing rivers, inundated streets and overwhelmed infrastructure. Since Friday, England, Wales and Ireland have been hit by the storm the Spanish meteorological agency has elegantly named Claudia, with grim results. One place in particular massively bore the brunt of it all: the Welsh border town of Monmouth, where the raging River Monnow spilled into the streets, people had to be rescued from their homes and drones captured aerial views of the scene, showing fragile-looking buildings suddenly surrounded by a huge clay-brown swamp.

Claudia and her effects made it into the national headlines – but mostly, local and regional floods now seem too mundane to attract that kind of attention. Eleven days ago, Cumbria saw submerged roads, blocked drains and over 250 flood-related problems reported to the relevant councils. Railway lines in Cornwall were submerged; in Carmarthen, in west Wales, there were reports of the worst floods in living memory. But beyond the areas affected, who heard about these stories? Such comparatively small events, it seems, are now only to be expected.

There have recently been reminders of how floods are only going to get more disruptive and dramatic. In mid-October, the insurance giant Aviva published a report titled Building Future Communities 2025, which was full of unsettling facts: among them, that over the past 10 years, one in 13 new homes have been built in the highest-risk flood zones; and that by 2050, the number of properties at risk from flooding could rise by 25% to 8m. It was accompanied by a Guardian article warning that “some towns may have to be abandoned”, a prospect that might already be flickering to life: in the Worcestershire town of Tenbury Wells, where there have been floods four times in the past six years, the council is already adjusting to the fact that the local civic buildings are now simply uninsurable.

Last week, I had long conversations with two academics who specialise in flooding and the huge challenges it presents. They mentioned years of underinvestment in flood defences and the £10.5bn the government has recently set aside for improvements between now and 2036, but also talked about the lack of attention paid to the natural protection provided by expanded wetlands, new forestry and the simple imperative to make urban environments as green as possible. They also spoke about what the Starmer government’s housebuilding drive – as and when it materialises – might mean for both the numbers of houses constructed in areas with a high flood risk, and whether new-builds will have decent drainage, and use permeable materials, rather than the concrete and asphalt that make flooding even more of a danger.

Prof Jess Neumann works at the University of Reading, where she specialises in “flood research leading to policy change”. A fundamental modern problem, she told me, is the fact that builders, local councils and water companies are getting these things “up to a standard that’s fit for today, not for 2070 or 2080, when we’re going to see much more extreme weather”.

She then talked about problems centred on the insurance business, and showed me figures for the share of commercial properties in areas at high risk of flooding that have no cover, often because premiums are too high, or insurers refuse to cover more than physical damage, leaving lost trade untouched. Those numbers are astonishing: at the last count, in 2022, 58% of retail space in such places is uninsured, and the same applies to 50% of offices. As flooding gets worse, there is therefore a rising fear that plenty of local economies will just hollow out: “businesses will leave, and places might fall into deprivation”.

Homeowners at risk of flooding currently benefit from the Flood Re scheme, which pools risk to make the necessary cover more affordable. But it will cease in 2039 – at which point, to quote from the official blurb, “the insurance market will return to fully risk reflective pricing for flood insurance”. That crystallises the prospect of places simply becoming uninhabitable, which may enter the public consciousness much sooner. “Nobody’s putting pins in the maps and saying, ‘these are places that we think will become uninhabitable – because people won’t be able to get insurance, people won’t be able to sell their houses, and businesses will move out,’” said Neumann. “But I think in the next five or 10 years, it’ll become clear where those places are.”

At Brunel University’s Centre for Flood Risk and Resilience, Dr Carola Koenig sounded even more stark. “At some point, some hard decisions have to be made – that certain communities will have to be relocated,” she told me. “Protection becomes so expensive that it’s not worth it, so you have to move communities to safer, higher ground.”

Here, though, we collide with a few huge issues. Can anyone imagine such a huge change happening amid a political system as replete with cynicism and climate denial as ours? What about the levels of public spending it would entail? Right now, thinking about this aspect of the future surely prompts another question, about flood defence, protection and resilience: why is there such a huge political silence about these likelihoods, and how all of us might start to prepare for them?

Eighteen years ago, I can vividly recall three days I spent driving along the course of the River Severn, in the midst of the dire floods of 2007. I spoke to people in the Gloucestershire town of Tewkesbury who talked about shoals of goldfish swimming down their street, and the deaths of a father and son who had been killed by the fumes from petrol-powered equipment while they were attempting to pump out the local rugby club. In Gloucester, I vividly remember an afternoon spent on a new-build residential avenue called Cypress Gardens, where a local builder told me that he had passed panicked warnings about its flood vulnerability to the council, only to watch as the development had gone ahead regardless, and then, as a brook that fed the nearby Severn had burst its banks, been hit by a metre of water.

These people were stoical, but also usually full of a sense of urgency. The problem is the rest of us, and how politics and power work to fill us with a completely false sense of security, which flies in the face of one particular part of the climate emergency: the fact that although people living close to rivers and coastlines are particularly vulnerable to inundation, the kind of flash floods that are now a regular event can happen absolutely anywhere.

In countries threatened by earthquakes, Neumann reminded me, the public tends to be told about the threats, and readied for action. “But we don’t do that here,” she said. “Our greatest natural hazard is flooding, and we don’t prepare people for it.” As she spoke, she suddenly highlighted all the madness of that everyday fact, and the grave dangers we still seem to be sleepwalking into.