Spongy landscapes

11 March 2026

In the wake of the publication of a briefing on managing water in the rural landscape, CIWEM's Head of Policy and Engagement, Catherine Moncrieff, explores why agricultural water stewardship is important for rivers and climate resilience

A river is the distillation of its landscape. I don’t know where I heard this but somehow it has stuck with me. It’s intuitive. Rain falls on our landscape, is absorbed by trees and grass, filtered through soil, runs down roads and highways and eventually makes its way into a river or stream, sometimes via a sewer.

It must be quite an exciting journey. Each droplet of water is a witness to the state of our soils, vegetation and urban areas. The chemicals and sediment it picks up are a testament to how we use our landscapes.

Towards the end of last year CIWEM launched its Sponge Cities UK initiative, the concept of managing rainfall where it lands in order to reduce surface water runoff, capture water for use, improve water quality and boost placemaking and wildlife in our towns and cities. Given that 70% of the UK’s landscape is farmland, if we want to increase flood and drought resilience and improve the health of rivers, it makes sense to also promote the idea of spongy landscapes or spongy soils alongside that of sponge cities.

**Click here to download the full 'Spongy Landscapes' report**

Yet one of the major disappointments of the recent Cunliffe Review on water and the government’s follow-on Water White Paper has been the lack of focus on agriculture. What we do to our soils and in our farmed landscape is inextricably linked to water resources and quality. This is against a backdrop of a UN report recently warning that the world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy”, where many societies are using water faster than it can be replenished in river, soils and aquifers. It feels like we should be doing more to support those that manage the land and the water that flows through it.

The sponge pioneers

With this in mind, in CIWEM’s policy team we’ve been exploring case studies of where farmers and land managers have been managing the landscape with water in mind. In particular, we’ve looked at how the approaches deployed are valued by those who reap the benefits of ‘stewarding water’.

I spoke to those either farming – or engaging farmers – in seven different farming landscapes across the country. From intensively farmed arable landscapes in East Anglia to the peaty glens of northeast Scotland, and everything in between. The measures deployed by these farming communities include regenerative farming techniques such as low tillage, cover crops and companion crops. Cover and companion crops absorb excess nutrients, enhance soil structure and build soil’s organic matter content. This means the soil is able to act more like a sponge, holding on to moisture during drier periods.

Other farmers in upper catchments are deploying natural flood management measures – such as leaky-woody dams in farm ditches – to capture and slow water after heavy rain. In other places, peatland restoration and wetlands created by beavers are reducing flood peaks downstream and augmenting lower flows in drier periods.

Reservoir farms?

The suggested positive impact of these measures is profound. At Waitrose’s Leckford Estate in Hampshire, for example, arable fields cultivated using regenerative techniques were found to contain a significantly higher organic matter content than those fields cultivated with standard farming techniques. This meant that during the dry summer of 2022, the soil in the regenerative fields was able to hold an additional month’s supply of water. Barley yields from the regenerative fields saw a 60% greater yield per hectare.

Meanwhile, at Spains Hall Estate in Essex, modelling suggests that if soil were managed in the right way, it could hold 5,829 Ml of water. If water stored in agricultural ditches and beaver wetlands is included a total of 5,942 Ml could be stored across the estate – enough to fill 12% of the planned Fens reservoir in Cambridgeshire.

They call this the ‘Whole Farm Reservoir’ approach, whereby water is held in the soil for use by crops, with some slowly filtering through the soil and subsurface to recharge groundwater and contribute flow to rivers downstream. Modelling calculates that this approach could boost summer flows by 5-10%, as well as reducing peak flood flows by 15-30%.

The value of spongy landscapes

These case studies demonstrate that this on-farm ‘water stewardship’ is valued not just by the farmers benefitting from increased climate resilience, but by businesses and communities on the front line when it comes to the impacts of floods, drought and pollution.

Affinity Water, for example, are protecting their water supplies by paying an uplift on Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) payments to farmers in their catchments to use cover crops and companion crops to absorb excess nutrients. Wildfarmed, in collaboration with Affinity Water, are adding a further uplift in certain areas for farmers that grow a diversity of cover crop species and commit to other regenerative agricultural practices.

More broadly, the water industry is investing in landscape (or catchment) approaches, recognising the importance of the rural landscape for their commodity – clean and plentiful water. Water companies are investing £3.3bn in nature-based solutions in the current asset management period, AMP8, although a significant portion is focused on urban areas and ‘end-of-pipe’ treatment wetlands to address sewage.

Change is taking place beyond the water sector too. In the northeast Cotswolds, Network Rail are investing in natural flood management – including floodplain reconnection to increase the resilience of critical assets, namely railway lines. (The line between Oxford and Worcester was down for several weeks following the July 2007 floods).

In the Calder catchment in west Yorkshire, a business looking to ensure the security of its water supply for its operations is investing in on-farm wetlands to ‘replenish’ water to the catchment. Above Glen Clova in northeast Scotland, peatland restoration is resulting in more consistent flows in the Rottal Burn, with a significant uplift in hydropower generation and revenue. The knock-on benefits of the restoration work to bird and fish numbers has been hugely positive.

How do we spongify our landscapes?

SFI is a vital government tool to support farmers in managing their land sustainably and rewarding them for restoring nature, increasing resilience to climate change and keeping rivers clean. The government’s decision to pause SFI in March 2025 was greeted with much frustration across the farming sector as this meant the loss of a readily accessible stream of funding for most farms.

The environment minister, Emma Reynolds, recently announced the reinstatement of SFI, with the first application opening in June prioritising smaller farms and those without existing agreements. She also said it would make the scheme “simpler, fairer and more predictable”. This is welcome, but the government must really stick to “predictable” part of that promise – uncertainty in funding and plans around the government’s Environmental Land Management Schemes (ELMS) has rocked an already struggling sector.

As we have seen with the pioneers described here, private funding can offer further support to some farming communities. This is an area ripe for growth, as businesses wake up to the realities of climate change and the need for increasing the resilience of their assets and operations. But the government needs to support the relatively nascent market of payments for resilience by creating market standards and frameworks, and using grant-in-aid (GIA) funding to provide seed funding to develop such schemes and underwrite private investment.

To some extent, this is happening already through Landscape Recovery, the top tier of ELMS. Covering multiple farms, large areas and establishing agreements for 20-30 years, Landscape Recovery offers a pathway to landscape-scale change and greater investment from the private sector. Yet the ability of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to pull out of Landscape Recovery agreements after 12 months threatens the viability of such schemes before they’ve even got out the starting blocks. This risks undermining the certainty needed for major, long-term investment from landowners, farmers and private funders to achieve landscape scale transformation.

The hope is that concerns around the legal agreements can be resolved and an approach co-designed that works for farmers, private funders and other stakeholders.

The other area of hope is the recently published Water White Paper. Although it says very little about agriculture, it offers a boost to existing regional water resources planning to tackle the full range of pressures impacting water quality and resilience. The ambition is to align policy and regulatory frameworks across water-related issues, hopefully facilitating access to pooled funding for on-farm water stewardship measures.

What next?

At CIWEM, we’ve compiled evidence from the case studies into a government briefing: making the case for ‘spongy landscapes’ and how farmers can be supported to manage the rural landscape for water and climate resilience. This will deliver enormous benefits: both for farmers as they see soil health and crop drought resilience improve; and for communities across the country facing flooding, water scarcity and pollution.

It will also mean that raindrops falling on fields have a positive story to tell when they reach the river.

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Click here to download the full 'Spongy Landscapes' report. You can also watch our recent webinar on this report.

This article originally ran in the Spring 2026 print issue of The Environment magazine. Become a member of CIWEM today to gain access to the quarterly magazine, as well as digital access (via MyCIWEM) going back to 2016.

Catherine Moncrieff is head of policy and engagement at CIWEM