Research findings just revealed by one of the EU North Sea Region Building with Nature partners in Scotland are revealing the true value of taking a sustainable approach to reducing flood risk - through the careful and targeted use of Natural Flood Management (NFM) measures, building with nature at a landscape scale across the whole Eddleston Water river catchment.
The Building with Nature (BwN) project, funded by Interreg, demonstrated BwN solutions that utilise natural processes to deliver flood risk and coastal erosion management whilst enhancing ecosystem services. The Scottish Government led the 'catchments' work package and the Eddleston catchment was the Scottish case study example. The project has developed an extensive list of outputs which are available from the link below.
Scotland's Flood Risk Management Conference 2021 was held from the 1st - 5th February 2021. The conference was virtual this year and covered a range of topics such as finance and green recovery, science and policy updates and communication and engagement. The conference organisers (Sniffer) have now published the conference outputs on their website. It is possible to see the virtual presentations or view them on a Vimeo channel. All outputs can be access via the link below.
A conference report highlighting key messages from the Scottish Flood Risk Management Conference 2020 has been published by Sniffer. The conference included a session on Natural Flood Management. The report contains links to audio sound recordings and video interviews.
The Tweed Forum, Scottish Government and SEPA are partners in the EU Interreg Building with Nature project. The project’s Policy Learning Group (PLG) has produced a series of country specific policy briefs. You may be interested in these Scottish policy papers written by Prof. Jim Hansom and Dr Alistair Rennie (coastal) and Prof.
The NERC NFM research programme is advertising a series of webinars. These one hour webinars occur roughly every month and cover a range of topics. The aim of the webinar series is to allow NFM researchers and practitioners to share knowledge and experiences. Registration is required in advance. For more details on future webinars or to view past webinars please visit the link below.
The Interreg BwN (Building with Nature)/FAIR /C5a end event 'Be Adaptive to Become Resilient' was held on the 4th June 2020. Over 150 people attended the online event. The recordings and presentations from the webinars and workshops are now available online (see link below). The event included keynote speeches by Kerstin Brunnström (President of the CPMR North Sea Commission) and Steve Mathies (Global practice leader on Coastal Restorations at Stantec).
The European Environment Agency has recently published a report on the importance of floodplains (report title: "Floodplains: a natural system to preserve and restore"). The report highlights the importance of natural and restored floodplains for managing flood risk and supporting other ecosystem services. A pdf of this report can be accessed via the link below.
A report has been published today by Scotland's Centre of Expertise for Waters on "Communities at risk of flooding and their attitudes towards natural flood management". The project team at the James Hutton Institute explored factors that affect community support for Natural Flood Management (NFM) and to understand the extent to which flood risk communities support NFM. They discussed NFM in focus groups in four Scottish communities at risk of flooding. The project found that such communities may often have an interest in learning about NFM.
A co-organised event in Edinburgh (May 2019) brought together international experts to discuss the challenges and opportunities for delivering Nature-Based Solutions. The goal of the event was to facilitate the knowledge exchange and share best practices between international researchers, practitioners and policymakers. One of the project partners involved in the event, LAND4FLOOD, have produced a short report on the event (link below).