This guide has been developed to provide simple, clear information on natural flood management measures for landowners and farmers in the North West.

This quick guide will help Environment Agency officers understand potential risks and liabilities to consider when working with natural processes to reduce flood and coastal erosion risk. This is relevant when working on projects involving natural flood management (NFM) interventions to be undertaken by:
– the Environment Agency itself
– contractors or other risk management authorities on our behalf
– others, such as local community groups, landowners and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) with whom we are working in
partnership

The following guidance and case studies have been created by the CaBA Urban Water Group to help catchment partnerships and planners in urban areas create sustainable catchments.

As part of the Natural Course project, City of Trees created a wet woodland in the heart of Salford to help improve the failing water quality of the Worsley Brook. A year on and the wet woodland is now thriving with greenery and wildlife is returning to the area.

The Sheffield Waterways Strategy shows an inspiring vision of Sheffield’s rivers by 2022; once again providing places where people choose to live, work and invest.

Beavers create complex wetland mosaics, creating ponds, canals, mires and braided streams, and coppicing trees like willow as aspen to maintain open grassland habitats within the mosaic. 

Norfolk Rivers Trust have created an innovative, natural treatment plant for over a million litres of water a day to help improve the quality of water that is returned to the River Ingol, one of Norfolk’s precious chalk streams.

The CaBA Biodiversity Pack focusses on the potential to restore natural processes, and the benefits this can have. It encourages practitioners to look to the restoration of natural ecosystem function when planning and delivering catchment projects, in order to make sustainable contributions to WFD and Biodiversity 2020 targets.

Upstream thinking is an initiative which looks at how land is managed to protect our rivers. By working with landowners, we can make changes to how land is managed to keep unwanted things out of rivers.

Water Co-Governance (WaterCoG) is an Interreg VB EU project aiming to share knowledge, develop and promote best practice approaches to water co-governance

A list of funding sources for natural flood risk management projects.

As part of the Cumbria Flood Action Plan, the Cumbria Strategic Flood Partnership hosted a series of workshops in 2017 for experts and practitioners to share with partners, stakeholders and communities across Cumbria, their current understanding and knowledge on a number of topics critical to managing flood risk on a catchment wide basis.