Protecting our planet: Nature's way

Nature-based solutions, from leaky dams to tree planting schemes, will be key to creating resilient ecosystems and communities, says Mark Lloyd, CEO of The Rivers Trust, if only we can find a route to rolling them out on a much wider scale

At a time when both public and private purses are tight, nature-based solutions (NBS) deliver multiple benefits and serve the interests of many different stakeholders.

They use natural features to address socio-environmental problems and are especially important in the context of water management. Interventions such as tree or hedge planting, leaky dams, wetlands, riparian buffers or floodplain reconnection help to restore or mimic the natural flow of water through the landscape. This alleviates the risk of flooding and droughts as well as filtering out pollutants and increasing biodiversity.

With more than 65 local trusts across the UK and Ireland, the Rivers Trust movement has decades of experience in getting boots on the ground – or wellies in the water – to protect, restore, and enhance our water environment. Our people are in their natural habitat when working outdoors, whether wading through the Wye or dipping in the Don. When we are working on solutions, we always aim to work with nature to restore the most natural processes which will deliver long-term, integrated solutions for our rivers and catchments.

Nature-based solutions can also complement hard engineering to extend the lifespan of grey infrastructure and make water treatment and flood defenses more efficient and cost-effective. In some cases they can even replace the need for chemical treatment and carbon-hungry concrete solutions. They enable sustainable housing development, help businesses to reach their ESG goals and allow citizens to enjoy, and benefit from, a healthier environment.

A fantastic example of NBS at work is in South Norfolk, where the River Waveney Trust has worked with partners on a natural flood management (NFM) scheme. After the village of Gissing experienced terrible flooding in 2020, members of the public approached the trust about reconnecting a local stream to its historic floodplain. With support from Norfolk Rivers Trust, WWF, Aviva, the Environment Agency, and Essex & Suffolk Water, the team lowered the stream banks in strategic places, as well as installing leaky dams and shallow scrapes to store water in Gissing and the surrounding area upstream of the village. Work was completed in September 2023, shortly before the arrival of Storm Babet and seven other named storms over the course of the winter.

“We weren’t expecting this work to be put to the test so quickly,” says Emily Winter, Catchment Officer at River Waveney Trust, “but we’re really pleased to see it functioning as we’d hoped. This has been a fantastic example of a relatively simple and low-cost project that will have far-reaching, positive impacts for the local community.”

As well as protecting properties from flooding, these measures will store water and release it back into the environment slowly, mitigating the impacts of prolonged dry spells or drought in one of England’s most water-stressed areas.

Attracting private investment
Further north, The Rivers Trust has also been involved with a pioneering NFM pilot project in Lancashire’s Wyre catchment. Between 2020 and 2022, partners from the Wyre NFM Investment Readiness project developed an innovative new financial model, blending public and private finance. This will see multiple beneficiary organisations such as local businesses repaid for their upfront investment in nature-based solutions through the sale of ecosystem services. More than 1,000 separate NBS interventions will take place throughout the catchment over nine years in order to reduce flood risk in the village of Churchtown, with the funds managed by a newly formed Community Interest Company.

This project was a pilot for the Government’s Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund (NEIRF). It was truly the first of its kind and is being used as a blueprint of how to attract private sector capital to finance natural flood management. We are building on what we learned and innovating with new models of funding in locations across the country in a variety of catchments including the Cumbrian Glenderamackin above Keswick and the Yorkshire Aire upstream of Leeds.

Although different in scale, the two projects in Norfolk and Lancashire demonstrate how the Rivers Trust movement is at the heart of delivering nature-based solutions, and I was delighted that each of them will now continue thanks to funding from Defra’s £25m NFM programme, announced in February.

More public funding
The River Waveney Trust will build on its work to alleviate surface water and fluvial flood risk in Gissing by completing further NFM interventions within the Frenze Beck, Dickleburgh Stream and Stuston Beck catchments. Collaboration with the local community, landowners and parish council will be key as the measures include reconnection of an historic river channel, as well as further floodplain meadows, leaky dams and scrapes.

Wyre Rivers Trust will expand upon the learnings of the Wyre NFM pilot project by developing the Wyre Catchment Resilience programme, which will deliver a suite of targeted measures to further alleviate flood risk. Wetlands, ponds, riparian buffer strips and soil management measures will all be used, and are designed to ensure that all interventions maximise flood risk reduction while restoring natural processes. The local ecosystem will benefit from increased biodiversity and carbon storage, and local communities will enjoy increased climate resilience and amenities.

These are just two of more than 20 projects led by local rivers trusts to benefit from Defra’s NFM funding, but we need much more input, financially and politically, if we are to meet the challenges facing our environment. The £25m fund announced in September 2023 was hugely oversubscribed – funding could increase tenfold and there would still be plenty of initiatives to spend it on.

A wider roll out
The urgency and scale with which we need to realise the potential of natural solutions is laid bare in our recently updated State of Our Rivers Report 2024. Our precious rivers are currently blighted by pollution, altered from their natural state and often buried underground, with many iconic species in decline and the wider landscape facing an increasing risk of both flooding and drought. Scant monitoring, weak regulation and enforcement, a lack of consideration for water in land management, and of course climate change are further exacerbating those pressures.

The Rivers Trust has long championed the integration of nature-based solutions on a large scale and we have the knowledge and skills to make it happen – but we can’t do it alone. And the trouble is that myriad hurdles stand in the way of organisations and landowners joining us. From the lack of standardised approaches and coordinated, consistent monitoring, to the need for more balanced permitting regimes for the water sector; from limited incentives for buyers and sellers of ecosystem services, to the absence of a cohesive market framework for these solutions, the many willing parties are currently struggling to deliver fully integrated solutions at the pace and scale we need.

That’s why we’re now ramping up our work through the Ofwat Innovation Fund mainstreaming nature-based solutions project, which we lead with United Utilities, Jacobs and Mott MacDonald. The aim of the project is to remove the barriers to the adoption of NBS and develop new enabling mechanisms. There are five priority areas we think will unlock the opportunity to really embed NBS in land and water management:

• Working with regulators and policymakers to enable policy and regulation for NBS – engaging with the likes of the Environment Agency, Ofwat and DAERA in Northern Ireland to test fit-for-purpose regulatory requirements for NBS that will also drive greater value;

• Investment mechanisms for NBS – assessing and testing models and mechanisms that incentivise joined-up funding, planning and delivery, as well as creating a multi-million pound investment pipeline for water industry, to deliver better value for customers and beneficiaries, as well as the wider societal and environmental benefits;

• Standardisation and integration – standardised and consolidated tools and processes for designing, building, managing, monitoring, validating and verifying NBS, along with standardised data and evidence for reporting on their impacts, to help to reduce the risk currently associated with NBS compared to the reliability of hard engineered solutions.

• Making NBS relevant and tangible – by using real-life or ongoing planned NBS activities, we’ll test our hypotheses, develop solutions, consolidate learnings, create joined up action plans and deliver greater value work, quicker.

• Coordination, steer and collaboration at national scale – pulling all workstreams into one coherent flow through continuous dissemination of learnings to further break down existing siloes in delivery of NBS.

These conversations and partnerships are finally starting to move the dial on nature-based solutions and make them a mainstream aspect of planning and infrastructure. We’re delighted to be joining CIWEM at the Flood & Coast Conference once again to keep up the momentum and ignite even more opportunity.

This post was originally published in the Summer 2024 issue of The Environment.