Type: Research
In the Autumn Statement (2016), Defra announced £15 million of government funding for natural flood management (NFM) schemes across England.
There were 26 catchment-scale projects and 34 community-led projects that provided data from the scheme. The CaBA Technical Team developed a tool in Arc GIS Online (AGOL) to coordinate the monitoring and evaluation of these projects to ensure that we maximise our learning from the program of work. The data submitted by the projects included a wealth of data about more than 4500 NFM assets that were delivered during the program. This data has been analysed and a final quantitative evaluation report produced which compliments the qualitative evaluation produced by the Environment Agency
The value of the data collected from this program can scarcely be exaggerated. If NFM is to become a mainstream part of flood risk management we need to learn by doing and the Defra £15M program provided that opportunity. The final report based on the data submitted into the AGOL tool can be downloaded from the link below. The key recommendations from this report have been incorporated into a revised AGOL tool which is accessible to all NFM projects and can be accessed via the link below. The Beta version of this tool will continue to evolve in 2022/23 as the CaBA technical team work with the Environment Agency’s ‘Mainstreaming NFM team’ .