One day in spring, in the middle of the woods of deepest darkest Kent, the South East Rivers Trust led a ‘safari’ to discover the value of nature-based solutions in increasing the resilience of our catchments and communities.
During the past few years, the South East Rivers Trust (SERT) has been developing a series of nature-based solutions for water with landowners in the Upper Beult Farm Cluster in Kent. Nature-based solutions for water (NbS for water) are features that hold back water in the landscape, slowing it down and filtering it so that water resources are replenished and flooding and pollution is reduced. These NbS include leaky woody dams, offline ponds and pasture management.
Explorers from a range of organisations navigated woods, wetlands and farmland to spot and learn about these NbS, covering four farms of the Upper Beult farm cluster.
Firstly, it was to demonstrate how these solutions can underpin water resources provision, as well as achieve nature recovery and other social and environmental benefits.
Secondly, we wanted our guests to imagine what benefits could be achieved if these NbS could be “scaled up”, such as across the whole of the River Medway catchment, of which the Beult is just one part.
Finally, we were keen to spark thought and discussion among our guests about potential partnerships and support that could facilitate this ambition.
The 30-strong party of intrepid NbS explorers were led by Kathi Bauer, SERT’s Senior Natural Capital Officer – and the list of organisations represented was a long one. It included staff from Southern Water, which has supported the development of the NbS with the Upper Beult farming cluster.
Others interested to find out more came from SES Water, the Upper Medway Internal Drainage Board, Water Resources South East, Kent County Council, Kent Wildlife Trust, Waitrose, Linking Environment and Farming (LEAF), the Marden farming cluster, the Forestry Commission and Swale Borough Council.
The safari showcased work that we had initiated through our Interreg2Seas PROWATER project, and further work we have continued with Southern Water’s support. These efforts were the culmination of several years’ work. As we outlined earlier this year, the PROWATER project alone has helped retain more than 60 million litres of water (enough to fill 24 Olympic sized swimming pools) annually.
Kathi explained how we had worked closely with farmers and landowners. She outlined how we had used our expertise to identify, develop and implement appropriate NbS to regulate the flow of water at appropriate locations in the upper catchment of the Beult.
What types of nature-based solutions were explored?
Leaky woody dams were a key solution spotted on the safari: by placing branches and logs across channels and land where water is known to flow, water is held back and “spills” from the channels to create a small wetland. The result is that instead of heavy rainfall running straight off the land, its movement is more gradual. This means its contribution to the flow of the River Beult (an important source for water supply) is spread across many more months of the year.
Holding water in the landscape in this way also means creating richer and more diverse habitat, attracting vegetation, invertebrates and birds that feed on them.
Offline ponds – separated from the river network – were also part of the safari. Offline ponds can be created in natural depressions in the land where water is directed using leaky woody dams. By retaining water, they supplement the Beult’s summer flows and also boost plant and invertebrate biodiversity.
Pasture Management – the benefits of mob grazing were also outlined as part of the safari. If cattle feed on small sections of their grazing land one piece at a time, grass and other vegetation is able to recover and establish. Water soaks into the soil better, with benefits including slowing the run-off of rainwater and pasture that is more resilient to drought.
Together, these nature-based solutions are managing the landscape for water and helping to address water scarcity in the south east, while also providing a range of additional benefits including natural habitat improvements. These solutions are therefore key to reversing the declining trend in biodiversity. According to the Natural History Museum, the world has already gone through the “safe limit for humanity” of biodiversity loss. The UK, its analysis says, has an average of only 53% of its biodiversity left and is in the bottom 10% of countries globally – and last among the G7 countries.
Multiple nature-based solutions all add up, which is central to the Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) principal of managing landscapes as a whole, rather than as separate sections of river or land in isolation.
This is central to our thinking at SERT and something with which those on this NbS Safari agreed: we need to make more of this happen.
For more information and to get in touch about developing nature-based solutions in the landscape, contact Cat Moncrieff, our Head of Water and Land Stewardship. Contact us at info@southeastriverstrust.org or by telephone, on 0845 092 0110.
As our PROWATER project comes to an end, Kathi Bauer, our Senior Natural Capital Officer, reports on the importance of working together using nature-based solutions to retain water in the landscape, protecting rivers and communities from the effects of climate change.
The results of our work, carried out over the past four years, will help retain 24 Olympic sized swimming pools worth of water in the catchment each year – and that’s just on a small section of the landscape.
Water scarcity is an issue we need to address now
Back in 2018, when PROWATER first started, a summer drought was putting pressure on water resources and nature. Then, we thought this was a timely reminder of how vulnerable our freshwater systems are to climate change and the need to address this challenge for people and wildlife.
Little did we know that, four years later, we would experience the driest July in England since 1935, with temperatures reaching 40°C for the first time. Almost the entire country had hosepipe bans imposed. Many rivers recorded the lowest flows ever seen – and it was even reported that the source of the Thames dried up.
River flows on the Beult at Stilebridge, at the bottom of the catchment, for five historic droughts and the year 2022. Some of the lowest flows ever were in 2022 (black line).
PROWATER – Protecting and Restoring Raw Water Sources Through Actions at the Landscape Scale – set out to demonstrate how nature-based solutions (NbS) can replenish water resources at a catchment scale. These NbS included wetland restoration and changes to rural land management.
In the four years since the project started, the South East Rivers Trust has worked with:
three water companies
24 farmers
It has delivered:
2 headwater wetland restoration sites
16 hectares of improved soil management
supported 8.4 ha of chalk grassland and heathland restoration
Together, these measures will help retain more than 60 million litres of water (enough to fill 24 Olympic sized swimming pools) in the catchments every year through slower release to the river and improved recharge to the groundwater aquifers.
The 2022 drought proved a valuable stress test for these measures, but also brought home the crucial importance of scaling up our efforts to restore catchments in order to protect rivers, wildlife, and our own need for water.
The restored headwater wetland at Streetend Wood, Moat Farm pictured in November 2022
Finding the right solutions for our catchments
As with any restoration effort, a key question was how this work could be funded. Public funding – mainly through agri-environment schemes – was set to change after Brexit, while private markets were only just starting to investigate how natural capital should sit alongside their regular balance sheets.
We worked in partnership with others to develop an evidenced base and demonstration site in the following areas
Friston Forest, part of the Eastbourne Chalk aquifer in the Cuckmere catchment and a focus area for project partner South East Water where chalk grassland and chalk heathland were restored
The Little Stour, where we supported Kent County Council and the Kentish Stour Countryside Partnership to improve soil health of farms. By doing this, we enhanced water replenishment of the chalk aquifer that feeds this chalk stream. This work included using cover and companion crops and an innovative rotational grazing trial on a stud farm.
We in particular focused on the River Beult, a tributary of the Medway, which feeds an important abstraction point supplying Bewl Water. This in turn provides water to large areas of Kent. The River Beult is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) – the only riverine SSSI in Kent – but is heavily degraded because of historic modifications, including drainage and dredging. Less than 5% of its area remains as wetland habitat – an important natural feature that would have been historically much more common.
The resilience of water supply in the Beult catchment and beyond is affected by a number of factors, including the presence and condition of habitats like wetlands across the catchment.
Working together to demonstrate how nature-based solutions can be delivered
Using mapping methods developed in PROWATER, we were able to target locations of potential headwater wetland areas, which, once restored, would help the river hold on to water for longer over the course of a year. Kent Wildlife Trust’s Upper Beult Farm Cluster officer helped us contact relevant landowners, leading us to visit Moat Farm, in the headwaters of the catchment, and Pullen Barn Farm, at the start of the High Halden tributary to the Upper Beult. On Pullen Barn Farm, we worked with owner Hugh Richards to trial introducing more species-rich pastures in his livestock system, as reported on a previous blog.
Moat Farm proved to be the perfect demonstration site for a new approach to restoration, focusing on process-based interventions with natural materials from the site. Landowners Mike and Jan Bax were crucial enablers, sharing our vision for the site: to demonstrate how wetland and stream restoration could look in the Upper Beult and make it a viable option for farmers and landowners.
The multi-year nature of the project allowed us to understand the opportunities on the site and build a strong relationship with Mike and Jan, and also the wider farmer cluster, facilitated by the welcoming partnership approach Kent Wildlife Trust took.
At Streetend Wood, one of two wetland restoration sites on Moat Farm, work started in February 2021. We took down some trees, before bird nesting season, to use as material for delivery of the main works in July. In November 2021, the site started wetting up before entering a long, dry period. However, throughout the drought, vegetation stayed lush and some standing water was present until September 2022, providing refuge for wildlife.
The timeline showing work at Streetend Wood, Moat Farm
From demonstration site to catchment-scale restoration
While we are really proud of what we have delivered here, we know it is nowhere near enough. Our catchment-focused natural capital mapping, building on the WaterSystem Maps developed by the University of Antwerp, has helped us identify 5,000 ha of potential wetland habitats in headwaters and along the stream network in the Beult alone. If we really want to make a difference to our rivers, then we urgently need to grab hold of these opportunities.
A map showing the contribution that natural habitats across the catchment make to protecting water quality in the Beult. Ⓒ South East Rivers Trust
So, how do we make this happen?
The answer, really, is simple: money. Most landowners will not be willing to engage with environmental schemes that have a detrimental impact on their business. While there are a number of positive, valuable options available under existing and new stewardship schemes that support farming with nature, we must go further than cover crops and two metre buffer strips.
We want to deliver on the vision of the Beult that we built over the course of the last few years and create a wetter, wilder and more diverse landscape where the river has space to thrive. We are also helping communities by slowing release of water into the river, from which water supply for the area is abstracted.
A vision of the Upper Beult catchment as we’d like to see it – a meandering river with functioning floodplains full of a mosaic of wet grassland and wetland habitats, wet woodlands in headwater catchments, thriving farms with hedgerows, ponds and healthy soils protected by vegetation all year round.
This comes with uncertainty, long-term land use change and unknown costs and activities that need to be built into schemes. We know that public funding can’t deliver on ambitions like this fully. The Green Finance Institute’s Finance Gap for Nature Report estimated that in order to deliver on the targets set by government, for example, we have a gap of £8bn funding committed to reach clean water-related targets alone.
Pilots show value for further funding
Our PROWATER Test & Trial, a sub-project of PROWATER delivered as part of Defra’s work to investigate how future government funded agri-environment schemes can support landscape-scale nature recovery, looked at how we could set payment rates that worked for farmers, and combine private funding (such as from water companies) with public money.
One barrier is the way that water company funding is regulated and its five-year cycle, among other issues. On a regional scale, for example, very few nature-based and catchment options have made it into the regional water resource plan. This is partly because of how difficult it is to model and quantify the cost-benefits of NbS on water supply.
Key to unlocking this will be piloting schemes at a larger scale and developing a shared ambition and understanding of drivers and barriers within the water industry. Then, using these schemes to develop new approaches to assessing, valuing, and integrating nature-based and catchment options into water company business plans.
Workshops helped bring together different water companies, regulators, conservation organisations and landowners.
In the Beult, we are now building on our work in PROWATER through a Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund as well as a partnership with Southern Water and the Upper Beult Farmer Cluster, funded through Southern Water’s Environmental Improvement Fund.
The future: Co-designing landscape-scale schemes
Building on the work at Moat Farm, we are working with nearby landowners to co-develop a plan to restore and protect 18ha of riparian and headwater wetlands along 2.5km of the Upper Beult.
Further afield, across other catchments in the south east, we are using the mapping developed as part of PROWATER to understand the natural assets in the catchment, how they contribute to resilient water supply, and where opportunities are for restoration. Developing this with water company partners (Southern Water and Affinity Water), we are building a shared evidence base of these habitat features and why they are important to protect. This will help us – and them – make decisions about how and where to invest funding and to understand the scale of investment needed and impact possible.
A crucial component is developing payment schemes for landowners that reflect the benefit they are providing to the water company and enable us to deliver value for money to both. There are a lot of challenges, but the most exciting and promising part of this project is that everyone involved sees the opportunity it offers and treats it as a way of learning how we can make this work – together.
PROWATER was funded through the European Regional Development Fund, with additional support from Southern Water, South East Water, Kent County Council, Defra and the Patsy Wood Trust.
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