Why aren’t nature-based solutions being delivered at scale?

29 July 2025

As the Environment Agency publishes a new position statement on nature-based solutions, head of water, Helen Wakeham, and Mark Lloyd of The Rivers Trust discuss the barriers to this approach

Working in the water and environmental sector, we hear about nature-based solutions – ways of working with nature to address environmental and societal challenges – all the time. This approach is said to be being prioritised across UK government and through environmental regulators such as Natural Resources Wales, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and the Environment Agency (EA) in England.

But are nature-based solutions being delivered in practice and at scale, and is it as simple as swapping concrete solutions for nature-based ones?

On this month’s Planet Possible podcast, Helen Wakeham, the EA’s director of water, and Mark Lloyd, CEO of the Rivers Trust, get into those questions, taking as their jumping off point a new position statement on nature-based solutions (NbS) published by the EA on 17 July 2025.

CIWEM director of policy Alastair Chisholm says he is “pleased to see that the EA has set out for the record that it wants NbS to be less of an innovation and more of a mainstream approach across a wide range of applications from flood risk management through water quality and water resources enhancement to air quality and carbon sequestration.

“It's also welcome that the agency view NbS as part of the water management 'system' and will be working with government to remove regulatory barriers to their wider use.”

If you enjoy this taster, you can listen to the full conversation here or search for Planet Possible in your favourite podcast app. Follow the podcast to stay updated on our monthly deep dives into pressing environmental challenges.

Now, over to Planet Possible host Niki Roach, Helen and Mark…

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Niki Roach: What was the rationale behind the EA’s position statement on nature-based solutions?

HW: There's quite a lot of misreporting on what nature-based solutions are and the Environment Agency's view of them. So we wanted to set out our position on nature-based solutions for water quality, water resources and flood management in one place. What we hope is that it will provide a platform for the work that we need to invest in nature-based solutions. There's something of a doom loop: until there's more nature-based solutions out there, we won't have the evidence. If we don't have the evidence, we can't have more nature-based solutions.

NR: What are some of your reflections on the statement, Mark?

ML: It's really helpful to see those words and hear those encouraging noises. Up to now, delivery of nature-based solutions has been quite difficult. It feels like there's a lot of hoops to jump through. There's a lot of permissions one has to get. Nature-based solutions can often feel like the last resort and that you've got to eliminate all other possibilities first. We'd like to flip that on its head and make nature-based solutions the first option, and then, and only if it's shown that that's not the right thing to do, then we would go for an engineered solution, because an engineered solution really only delivers one thing.

A stormwater tank just stores sewage effluent for treatment later when it stopped raining, but it has lots of negatives: it produces huge amounts of carbon from the concrete; it takes up some land; no one gets to visit it. Whereas a sustainable drainage scheme (SuDS) in an urban area provides green space for local communities, it reduces the fear of crime, it cools our overheated streets, it locks up carbon and it stores water, so it prevents surface water flooding, as well as reducing the loading on our sewer system. So it's a multi-benefit solution that helps all sorts of major issues that we're trying to tackle in society, rather than just one.

We have seen a lot of good policy documents in our time, and the government often puts these statements out saying that we need more nature-based solutions. But because our system - both the legislative system and people's imagination about what they're used to doing – is very much orientated around an engineered approach, we tend to default to that, which I think is a missed opportunity.

HW: The ambition is that nature-based solutions are the most commonly used approach and then we can properly get on to understanding what's the most appropriate solution for the location, what's going to comply with the law, how do we make sure that the scheme that we put in actually delivers what it's intended to deliver?

NR: Helen, is it a challenge to regulate nature-based solutions, which are naturally a bit more ambiguous in their outcomes?

HW: At the moment, the way the law works, you need permission to take water out of the environment, you need permission to hold it somewhere and you need permission to put it back. The concept of constrained discretion, which came out of the [recently published] Corry Review [of Defra’s regulatory landscape], is that you can take some of that out and do things more simply in a location. So we're looking at how we do that.

There's another thing arising out of Corry, which is called “trusted partners”. Are there organisations we can work with where we can relax some of the rules which will make it easier to get some things done in places? We think it's a good idea.

When [the final report of] the Independent Water Commission comes out, it will give us some more ideas, and government will get some more steer on how we'll actually do that because we want to use these schemes but we do also need to make sure that there's adequate protections for people and wildlife.

NR: Mark, what are some of the barriers that you're seeing as The Rivers Trust?

ML: The legislative framework in which the Environment Agency operates is quite tight. I have great sympathy for Helen and colleagues trying to regulate in this area, because it's all very well saying, ‘let's just put in a wetland and see how it goes’, but they are required to hold water companies and others to account for delivering to a permit standard, and that's very tight. And if they don't do that, then a lot of other organisations out there will give them a very hard time, and potentially fight legal challenges.

Yes, we do face a lot of barriers, and there is some great work going on at the moment to try and break down some of those barriers to our own delivery of them on the ground. But the real essence of this is getting them funded at scale. We've pulled together partnerships around the country and worked through the legislative system and managed to put quite a lot of them in place. But it’s in spite of the system, rather than because of it.

We've got to stop thinking about the benefits of natural flood management as separate. We've funded them in the past with separate budgets, separate regulatory systems, and we need to integrate a lot more and start thinking about our vision for a transformed landscape that can deliver us all of these services. It really requires quite a fundamental change of the way that our regulators work, our funding streams work: merge them together and deliver things with multiple outcomes.

That's easy to say and harder to do, but there's a huge prize. At the moment, we're really struggling to keep up with tackling these challenges, and in many cases, we're failing. The overall picture with nature and water quality, is that we're flat lining, or things are getting worse. If we're going to break that cycle or start getting the curves going up we've really got to change our thinking and think in a much more integrated, multi-functional way.

HW: I was really pleased to see the Independent Water Commission interim report acknowledge up front that we need to take a systems approach to water, which is what Mark is describing. Where there's a challenge is that sometimes the right solution for natural flood management and for water quality might be in a different place in a catchment and to achieve one, you might get a trade off with another. Which is not to say that you don't get a benefit, but we need to be really clear-eyed about what clean and plentiful water looks like. For example, we know that if we do everything we know how to do, we still won't achieve clean and plentiful water, because near natural, clean and plentiful water is such a difficult thing to achieve.

Sometimes I'm talking to politicians in London and they talk about returning the Thames to near natural. That means not having the Embankment in London. That means returning to a natural floodplain. Of course, you can't do that. I don't think this is what you were saying, Mark, I'm exaggerating for effect. There's working with nature and there’s also making nature work harder and making the hard engineering work harder too, and using them together to achieve the improvements that we need. It’s tremendously exciting, because it's really innovative.

I don't see hard engineering and nature-based solutions in opposition. I see them as a blend, and you can really see that in some of the solutions coming forward for natural flood management and wastewater. The thing we're really not doing enough of is getting upstream. There's so much talk about pollutants in our water systems, but we're not talking enough about how to get that pollution out of the system at source, and that's where we've got a real opportunity.

ML: Prevention is better than cure – water management gets progressively more expensive the further downstream you go, so the best place to intervene is when a raindrop hits the ground. Restored soils have a huge benefit, but also in terms of chemicals, things like PFAS and microplastics, we are putting them into our water supply and then spending a huge amount of money taking them out. That's a complete waste of resources at a time when resources are very scarce. We need to be spending money on making progress rather than cleaning up our own mess: banning a lot of chemicals at source, reducing the amount of chemicals that we're using, educating people about what they can dispose of down the drain (which is pretty limited).

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You can read the Environment Agency’s new position statement on nature-based solutions here.

There’s much more where that came from – listen to the full conversation here. You can search for Planet Possible in your favourite podcast app. For more CIWEM news updates, sign up to 'The Environment' newsletter, our free monthly news round up.