River and floodplain management measures involve the restoration of a stretch of river and/or its associated floodplain to a more natural functioning state. This can include channel re-meandering or channel feature reinstatement (e.g. measures to restore channel river bars). Where redundant embankments are present, it may also be possible to breach, set back or remove these embankments, restore floodplain connectivity and re-activate floodplain features. Where naturally occurring wood is absent from a river, leaky barriers can be installed. These help attenuate flood flows by slowing and deflecting flow out of the channel on to the floodplain, thereby increasing water storage.
The Eddleston Water project won two awards at the Chartered Institute of Ecology & Environmental Management's 2023 Awards ceremony in Birmingham on 28th June. Competing against a wealth of other excellent projects, Tweed Forum and its partners' study of the effectiveness of natural flood management won the CIEEM Best Practice Award for Large-Scale Practical Nature Conservation.
Prof Chris Spray gave an invited presentation in the opening Plenary Session of the major CIWEM/Rivers Trust annual Floods and Coasts 2023 conference in Telford on Nature-based Solutions for reducing flood risk
This focussed on four main areas:
The terms restoration and nature-based solutions are both commonly used these days, and sometimes used interchangeably. But are they identical?
The Environment Agency have commissioned Qa Research to research NFM training needs amongst people with a role in NFM in England. The Environment Agency wants to ensure that everyone involved in NFM has the skills, knowledge and expertise they need. Therefore this survey has been constructed to understand where there is a need for training for those who have a role in NFM to inform the development and availability of suitable training.
The River Restoration Centre (RRC) have a long history of running river related training events (inc. on the topic of NFM). The RRC have just released a number of training events that will take place over the next 6-months. These included courses on river erosion management and restoring river floodplain systems. There is a mix of in-person and virtual training events. More information on the training courses can be found by clicking the link below.
Chris Spray (University of Dundee and Tweed Forum) has written a case study for the Ecosystem Knowledge Network based on Tweed Forum's experiences of working on the Eddleston Water Project, entitled Putting People first: Community engagement and sharing best practice in Catchment Restoration.
The Scottish FRM2023 Conference took place in Perth in February this year. The topic of the conference was "Water Resilient Places". It was a 2-day conference which over 200 people attended (both in person and online). There were 59 speakrs and a number of workshops. A theme of one session was on Nature-Based Solutions (inc. NFM). All the slides and videos of the presentations are now available on Sniffer's website (see link below). They have a dedicated Vimeo channel hosting the session recordings.
The Eddleston Water project, Tweed Forum and Scottish Government's long-running empirical study of the effectiveness of Natural Flood Management (NFM) has just been designated by UNESCO as one of their new Ecohydrology Demonstration sites, becoming the first one in the UK to achieve this recognition. The project is in its 13th year of operation and will now be included as a Demonstration Site in the UNESCO Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme (IHP), part of the intergovernmental UN system that’s dedicate
A focus review paper on mitigating floods and attenuating surface runoff with temporary storage areas (TSAs) in headwaters has been published in the journal WIRES (Wiley Interdiciplinary Reviews) Waters. TSAs represent a category of soft-engineered nature-based solutions that can provide dispersed, small-scale storage throughout a catchment. Measures include e.g., bunds, offline ponds and leaky barriers. This open access paper focuses on the role of relatively small-scale (<10,000 m3) TSAs in headwater catchments for flood risk management.
A report has been produced by the Environment Agency that evaluates their Natural Flood Management programme. Between 2017 and 2021, £15 million of government funding was invested in 60 pilots across England. The report looks at 4 phases of NFM project lifecycle; a) Partnership working, b) Valuing benefits and project assessment, c) Project implementation and d) monitoring and sustaining the benefits.