Fundamentally, actions such as soil aeration or regenerative agriculture can potentially deliver outcomes for both flood risk management and water resources, not to mention water quality.
These are almost completely independently-funded areas of water management which, with a well-monitored, outcomes-approach where benefits could be reliably quantified and delivered through a single action could be tapped into by land managers.
This could suddenly make water management a profitable business for farmers alongside food production: Integration of multiple public and private funding streams would support a higher overall valuation of these services, in-turn making the cost-benefit justification for data-gathering and monitoring of outcomes easier: A win-win.
If concerns over stacking payments can be overcome then farmers selling water storage services within their soils as a measurably profitable value-add to their core farm businesses could – maybe – happen.
'Stacking' should in principle operate as a process where an agreement will be struck with a buyer at a price for a specific outcome (e.g. flood resilience, or groundwater recharge, or biodiversity enhancement).
Buyers of these specific services would then pay less than they would if they had funded the whole on-farm action (e.g. going regenerative, or beaver introduction) themselves. Land managers meanwhile, achieve the higher price they need to take up more challenging but higher environmental value-add interventions.
It probably sounds outlandish now, but in the face of the climate pressures we face – both flooding and drought – we should be thinking this way and working fast to fully understand just what healthy soils can give us. Not just from a food security point of view, but also from a climate and water resilience perspective.
Soil – that long-abused medium which is on borrowed time with our current approach to managing it – could just end up being our saviour with a bit of sponge-treatment.

Alastair Chisholm
Director of Policy
[i] 2022 Mark Mulligan, Arnout van Soesbergen, Caitlin Douglas and Sophia Burke Natural Flood Management in the Thames Basin: building evidence for what will and will not work in Elena Lopez Gunn, Peter van der Keur, Nora Van Cauwenbergh, Philippe Le Coent and Raffaele Giordano (eds) in Greening Water Risks. Springer. In press.