Winter freeze-ups and phew-what-a-scorcher summers may traditionally have made more dramatic headlines for newspapers, but in Britain the real threat from climate change today comes from flooding. The rains that hit north-west England and southern Scotland over the weekend were certainly exceptional. A record 341.4mm of rain fell at Honister in the Lake District. And the storms had devastating consequences. One man has died, 3,500 homes have been flooded, more than 2,000 of them in Carlisle, while road, rail and power links have all been cut. Yet this year’s floods were hardly unusual.

Storm Desmond: Cameron promises to review flood defence plans – live Read more

The floods of December 2015 follow, among many others, floods in 2014 in Somerset and the Thames valley, floods in north Yorkshire and Tyneside in 2012, floods in West Cumberland in 2009, floods in the Severn Valley in 2007 and floods in Carlisle in 2005. This is getting to be almost an annual event. Those who are at the sharp end are entitled to be angry. It is high time we learned the lessons better and got the measure of the problems more thoroughly.

The first thing we need to learn is to stop talking about once-in-a-century risks. Many of the worst affected areas in the current floods are places that have already been through bad floods in the past few years. Several had been equipped with sturdier and more comprehensive flood defences, which have held up against recent but lesser flood threats, as David Cameron was right to point out when he visited Carlisle on Monday.

Yet when the rains came this time those defences were overwhelmed. Cockermouth, on the edge of the Lake District, was inundated in 2009 when eight-foot-deep floods coursed through the town centre. Since then, a £4.4m system of flood barriers has been installed to protect the town from its two rivers. But still the floods came back to Cockermouth at the weekend. For some people in the town, this was the fourth flood in a decade. Things can’t go on like this.

When a house is flooded, the consequences are awful: physical dangers, damaged homes, written-off possessions and insurance claims are just the start of it. That these things should happen at a celebratory time of year – as is the case with many recent floods – is particularly miserable. But the effects endure beyond midwinter, sometimes for years, in the shape of the long clean-up, living in temporary accommodation, delayed insurance claims, increased premiums for householders and businesses, and in the exhaustion and trauma. Those who have experienced one flood will often live in fear of another whenever the heavy rains come. They should not have to do so.

Local people, the emergency services and civil society performed heroically this weekend. In the end, though, only the state has the authority and money, working with and through local government, to sort these problems out in the long term. That has to be the government’s priority, not just while the floods are still on the bulletins and front pages, but right through until the job is done.

The current government talks a lot about its commitment to infrastructure. George Osborne is fond of claiming that “we are the builders”. Surely this is therefore the time for the builders to build the infrastructure that people want and need. It’s time for the government to put its money where its mouth is. Flood defences are much greater priorities for those affected by these recurrent floods than HS2 or a third runway at Heathrow. Every pound spent on keeping communities dry and protected saves £10 in damage. It also brings the wider social and economic dividends that come with security.

Questions raised by flooding in Cumbria | Letters Read more

Not every home can be defended against the sea or the floods all the time. As a last resort, some communities may have to move. And we need to understand that flood defences are still doing their job if they delay the flooding before being overwhelmed by it, as happened in several places this weekend. In the longer term a strategic response must contain a mix of ecologically smart strategies, rather than making a sole priority everywhere of dredging and channelling rivers which can then become even more lethal in spate. This country builds too much on flood plains. That must change too.

Although much more must be done on the ground, the fate of homes in these islands is also umbilically linked to the fate of the climate change talks in Paris. A treaty will not stop the rain. But a treaty will play its part, over time, in shaping climate change so that threatened communities do not have to look so fearfully and so often at the rising waters and say to themselves: “No, not again.”