Mainstreaming natural flood management?

At least 1 in 6 people are at risk of flooding from rivers and the sea. Many more are at risk from surface water flooding. We cannot afford to take our eye off the ball when it comes to responding to a changing climate.???

Natural Flood Management (NFM) aims to keep communities safe from flooding. It also creates better places for people and wildlife. That’s why NFM is a central pillar of our National Flood and Coastal Risk Management Strategy .???

NFM uses natural processes to reduce the risk of flooding. These processes protect, restore, and mimic the natural functions of catchments, floodplains and the coast to slow and store water.? It can include re-meandering rivers and installing leaky dams to slow the flow and help store floodwaters. It can also involve blue-green sustainable drainage systems. For instance, ponds, swales, and large grass verges along roads. These help to intercept and reduce surface water run-off in densely populated areas.?

With all these options in mind, we want to make NFM an everyday choice for all rather than a special case for some.??

The good news is that we have learnt a huge amount from the ￡15 million Natural Flood Management Pilot Programme, which ran from 2017 to 2021. To learn more about this, you can read our full evaluation report .?

So, it’s exciting that the Environment Agency and Defra are today launching a call for applications for a new ￡25 million NFM programme for England.??

Our new programme will enable us to accelerate new opportunities for NFM delivery whilst also further improving our knowledge. It will also help meet the Government’s target to double the number of Government-funded projects that include nature-based solutions to reduce flood and coastal erosion risk.??

The ￡25 million programme - our biggest ever single investment in NFM - will be different to anything we have done before in the following three ways:?

• We will be enabling project applications from a wide range of organisations.??

We know that local leadership, experience and knowledge, particularly of landowners and farmers, was key to the successful delivery of the NFM pilots. We also saw how critical many third sector organisations were to forging strong community-based ownership of projects. With that in mind, we want to see project applications coming from a wide range of applicants and partnerships – including farmers, landowners, environmental organisations, catchment groups and local authorities.??

• We will be streamlining our processes to make it easier to develop NFM projects?

Feedback from practitioners is that one of the challenges for the wider uptake of NFM is that methods for quantifying the economic benefits, in flood risk terms, are in their relative infancy. To address this, we are developing a new national tool for consistently estimating flood risk reductions and other environmental benefits that will help to save time and avoid disproportionate project development costs. Our evidence also shows that NFM measures often work best within a larger landscape or at a catchment scale. And so, we will also be encouraging applications that package a combination of inter-linked NFM projects across a catchment or along a coast.??

• We will be promoting NFM projects that help to also contribute to local nature recovery and healthy rivers?

Alongside the benefits to flood and coastal resilience, we also know that NFM projects provide wider benefits to society including enhancing habitats and biodiversity and improving water quality, as well as storing carbon. The original NFM pilots programme achieved improvements to 4,000 hectares of habitat and 610 kilometres of river as well as planting 100 hectares of woodland. We therefore want to see project applications coming forward that champion these wider benefits so we can monitor them over time and evaluate their added value.??

In addition to our new programme, later this year we are updating our ‘Working with Natural Processes’ (WwNP) Evidence Directory so that it provides an up to date source of information for practitioners and policy makers.??

We hope you are inspired on how we can harness the power of nature to drive greater flood and coastal resilience.?

For more information, you can view the Natural Flood Management Programme Prospectus online.

Apply now !?Applications are open until 10th November 2023.

Article written by Julie Foley , our Director of Flood Risk Strategy and Natural Adaptation.