Woodland

The Facility for Investment Ready Nature in Scotland (FIRNS) is a joint initiative between Scottish Government, NatureScot, and the National Lottery Heritage Fund Supporting the development of environmental projects in Scotland. FIRNS aims to value and monetise ecosystem services derived from the restoration of natural capital assets, in a model that will attract and repay investment or support an investment model that can be scaled up and duplicated elsewhere.

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 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 13^th 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 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. 

The Forestry Commission, Scottish Forestry, Natural Resources Wales and Northern Ireland Forest Service have published a new UK-wide guide outlining how our forests and woodlands can reduce the damaging effects and financial impact of flooding on vulnerable communities. Woodlands can play a key role in flood mitigation and make an important contribution to reducing downstream flood risk.

A new open access book entitled “Spatial Flood Risk Management: Implementing Catchment-based Retention and Resilience on Private Land” has been published. Centralising the role of land and landowners, the book brings together knowledge from socio-economy, public policy, hydrology, geomorphology, and engineering to establish an interdisciplinary knowledge base on spatial approaches to managing flood risks. It contains chapters from over 25 different European authors and is an output from the EU funded COST action "Natural Flood Retention on Private Land".

The Riverwoods initiative (see main website for more info) aims to create a network of thriving riverbank woodlands and healthy river systems across Scotland. It has recently published an interactive storymap which allows users to explore projects across Scotland and find out more generally on the initiative. This storymap can be accessed below.