The Environment Agency has published a new report setting out the initial findings of the Natural Flood Management (NFM) programme and how it is strengthening flood resilience.
Since 2017 the EA has invested £15 million of funding from government to learn more about NFM through 60 pilot projects across England. Of these 26 are catchment scale projects led by risk management authorities and 34 are community scale projects led by local community groups and charities.
The primary aims of the pilots were to:
- reduce flood or coastal erosion risk to homes
- improve habitats and increase biodiversity
- support and develop partnership working with and between communities
- contribute to research and development
Working with the Catchment Based Approach (CaBA), the Agency has developed an online tool to coordinate the monitoring and evaluation of the projects. This shows that the pilot projects have installed over 4,500 NFM measures across England. The EA will continue to update the online tool with the data and also include projects from outside the NFM Programme.
The Agency commented:
“Our partners have brought expertise, contributed funding and provided thousands of hours of voluntary time. This has helped us achieve so much more than we would have done alone.”
Some of the projects are continuing to install NFM measures with funding from other sources. Most projects will collect data for many years to come.
The EA is continuing to work with partners to collect data to monitor the long term benefits of the programme. In 2022 it will publish an evaluation of the NFM programme and update the Working with Natural Processes Evidence Directory.
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