Land and runoff management

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).

An open access paper on "The potential of runoff attenuation features as a Natural Flood Management approach" has been published in the Journal of Flood Risk Management. The study utilised data from the Belford Burn catchment in N.E. England, and in particular the offline storage areas within the catchment. A modelling framework was created to demonstrate the impact of an offline storage area. The results showed that peak flow can be reduced by more than 30% at downstream receptors within the catchment.

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).

A handbook on Nature-Based Solutions has been published by "ThinkNature" (https://platform.think-nature.eu/). The handbook was developed as part of the ThinkNature project which recieved funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The main purpose of the handbook is to gather and promote current knowledge surrounding Nature-Based Solutions . The handbook looks at different aspects of Nature-Based Solutions (e.g. project devlopment, financing, policy making) through a number of informative chapters.

An open access book has recently been published addressing the issue of Nature-Based Flood Risk Management on Private Land. It is published by Springer and was edited by Thomas Hartmann, Lenka Slavíková and Simon McCarthy. The authors highlight that knowledge from many different disiplines will be required to deliver Nature-Based Solutions on private land. Therefore, the book highlights a number of international case studies and gives a different disciplinary perspectives (via a commentry) on each case.  The book can be accessed from the link below.