Reflections from 10 years of The Catchment Based Approach (CaBA)

Boosting sustainable land management across England, CaBA’s success is built on collaboration. Rob Collins and Ali Morse of the CaBA National Support Group reflect on the last 10 years and what's next for CaBA.

The Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) was established just over 10 years ago by Defra with the bold vision of embedding a collaborative approach to land and water management across England. Globally unique in its catchment-scale national coverage and framework of support, CaBA realises a range of environmental and social benefits.

More than 100 CaBA partnerships encompass river catchments across the whole of England and cross-border with Wales and Scotland. They integrate the public and private sectors with civil society through the participation of a diverse range of organisations including environmental NGOs, water companies, local authorities, government agencies, businesses, landowners, academia, and local community groups. These partner organisations collectively pool and review evidence, plan, and deliver interventions.

CaBA’s innovative model brings local knowledge and expertise to bear, empowering individuals, organisations, and communities to take ownership of local issues and providing the catalyst to implement cost-effective delivery on the ground. Improvements to water quality, reduced flood risk, increased climate resilience, nature recovery and more sustainable businesses are all part of this integrated approach.

Framework of national support

The CaBA National Support Group (NSG) constitutes approximately 30 active members who represent many of the organisations engaged in partnership working. The NSG plays a key role in supporting CaBA activity and promoting it across key stakeholders, aiming to strengthen the diversity of the wider initiative and help it bring together new and synergistic sources of funding.

The NSG also oversees a programme of support to partnerships across a wide range of technical areas including modelling, spatial analysis and project delivery, and via a series of thematic working groups that each seek to ensure that policy and practice are alive to the benefits of a catchment-based approach across key areas such as urban water management, biodiversity and flood management. Additionally, a water stewardship service raises awareness of CaBA amongst businesses, highlighting the opportunities it provides to support business water stewardship strategies, and providing support to catchment partnerships to engage with business and develop collaborative projects.

The provision of data and evidence is a key focus of CaBA support to catchment partnerships nationwide, helping them to determine priorities for action, identify interventions, and develop catchment plans. The online CaBA Data Package is a set of 200 data layers made available to all partnerships under agreed national licences with each of the data providers who include water companies, Government Agencies, research institutes and universities. The national scale data layers include the output from predictive tools such as SCIMAP and FARMSCOPER, flood risk maps, water quality status, air quality, biodiversity, water resources and ecosystem service opportunity maps.

Each of the layers is clipped to catchment boundaries - although they can equally be cut to any spatial scale - and provided to each partnership.

Catchment plans and information platforms

Each CaBA partnership combines this national data with local evidence, underpinning the development of their own catchment plan, derived through a participatory approach, whereby the organisations involved within a partnership collectively agree priorities for action.

CaBA Partnerships are also increasingly developing catchment-scale shared information platforms or ‘Storymaps’ These require no specialist software and through combining data with a narrative, maximise the wider community’s access to, and understanding of, the evidence base.

These platforms enable partnerships to augment regulatory evidence with their own data, growing it into a resource which is relevant to their priorities and aspirations.

Environmental and social benefits

CaBA has implemented hundreds of projects nationwide since its inception, addressing a range of catchment and riverine issues. These encompass rural land management including nutrient and soil management, riparian management including planting and fencing, farm infrastructure improvements and support to farmers in accessing agri-environment grants.

Delivery in the urban environment includes nature-based solutions to reduce flooding and improve water quality, the tackling of road runoff and misconnections and public awareness campaigns. Some local authorities contribute funding to CaBA hosts in recognition of the importance of the partnerships in helping the authority to meet their environmental responsibilities.

Habitat restoration, both terrestrial and freshwater, is another key focus for partnerships. This includes the creation and protection of wetlands and priority habitats, river restoration including re-meandering, and interventions to support river connectivity. Numerous natural flood management projects have been delivered, supported by the creation of a dedicated hub to capture details including monitoring and evaluation.

Substantial time and resource within CaBA are targeted at the building of social capital, establishing relationships with a diverse range of partners, building trust, and providing a foundation upon which collaborative delivery of environmental projects can follow. This includes the provision of volunteer and citizen science opportunities, thereby improving the local evidence base as well as connecting people with nature and enabling them to take ownership of environmental issues.

Sustainability

CaBA Catchment Partnerships are undertaking an increasingly important role in catchment management across England, with significant scope in policy terms to do even more, yet they face significant challenges around funding, capacity, and capability. Partnerships take time to build and commitment to sustain. Whilst they have proven adept at securing funds from a diverse range of sources, raising approximately £3 from non-Government sources for every £1 of Government investment, for most, continued public-sector funding for development and capacity building is likely to remain critical. They have endured a real terms funding cut every year since their formation 10 years ago, which has become more impactful with recent rates of inflation.

A holistic approach to land and water management

Catchment Partnerships operate within a wider framework for managing the water environment, which is inefficient, disjointed and, at times, confusing. There is a plethora of plans, but few successful attempts to join them up and identify opportunities to deliver them in a co-ordinated way. Consequently, our approaches to addressing flood risk, tackling pollution, driving nature recovery, and building climate resilience remain piecemeal, and unable to realise the multiple benefits for both the environment and people that are achievable.

Investment opportunities, particularly from the private sector, are missed because there is no clear strategy for delivery. While there are excellent examples of collaborative delivery at a local level, these can only be scaled up to have a national impact and become business as usual if we develop a clearer, accessible governance system for collaboration to be nurtured at catchment, regional and national scales.

To achieve the outcomes aspired to in the Government’s Plan for Water, a marked shift in approach is required, whereby the wealth of policy and plans pertaining to land and water management are addressed in a holistic way. In doing so, optimal, cost-effective, and synergistic outcomes can be identified across Local Nature Recovery Strategies, ELMS, the Water Industry’s National Environmental Programme, Drainage and Wastewater Management Plans, flood risk management, Local Authority planning and more besides.

This will require much greater commitment from all key stakeholders to work collaboratively to identify, prioritise and deliver outcomes at a catchment scale. And here is where the CaBA partnerships can play a key role, using their proven convening power to bring together public, private, and civil society stakeholders, providing a common understanding of local issues through the provision of data and evidence, and undertaking project delivery on the ground.

In other words, CaBA can provide the glue that holds together a new and truly holistic approach to land and water management. But, to do so, will require a marked increase in funding for CaBA Partnerships to continue to build their capacity and expertise and, a more formalised recognition and legitimacy of their role.

Rob Collins is Director, Policy and Science, The Rivers Trust and Chair of the CaBA National Support Group

Ali Morse is Water Policy Manager, The Wildlife Trusts and member of the CaBA National Support Group and Biodiversity Working Group

Learn more about the Catchment Based Approach.