Nature

Water is a fundamental resource in the UK but now we are experiencing the loss of nature, experiencing climate change and we're seeing droughts but we're also seeing flooding and these are all things that impact nature.

We’ve developed this report to bring together a series of case studies all about implementing nature-based solutions in urban and agricultural environments.

So, Lloyds Banking Group joined up to Projects for Nature as a founding business partner in early 2024 because we wanted to be able to work with nature recovery projects on the ground, showcasing nature-based solutions and showing what they can do.

Like we are seeing here today, up in the Lakes in Cumbria. At The Rivers Trust we’ve got a range of different interventions that have been delivered on the Resilient Glenderamackin project, and it is a landscape scale project looking at storing, intercepting or holding water in that landscape, reducing flood risk but we also improve water quality.

This project is all about how do we bring various different stakeholders and groups together, that are involved in this catchment. Farmers are a really fundamental part of that.

I'm Joe Lyall, we are a 350 cow dairy farm, in the Eden Valley of Cumbria. We took on this farm on a farm tenancy in 2012 and we realised that we needed to put money into the farm so we could improve our business, improve our profitability and that was going to involve incorporating nature-based solutions to reduce the phosphate that's getting into the river.

The biggest source of phosphorus in our farm is from the slurry, from the cows.

These are the two ponds that we've fitted. They take water running up from the farm and we can collect the sediment and nutrients that otherwise would have gone into the river.

The vegetation, they can pick up some of that sediment that's been collected in the ponds, convert it into their own biomass, that means that any water collected can be diverted clean into the river.

There’s lots of things we can be doing on farms to manage the water quality but also the quantity of water like planting hedgerows, planting trees, which can help to manage the water downstream.

The sediment ponds we have here as well as contributing to that water quality issue, they also have a role to play in that water quantity issue.

What that means is that downstream communities are not going to be as heavily affected by periods of flooding or high rainfall as they otherwise would have been without these interventions, these nature-based solutions upstream. Water is really important now when you're thinking about new buildings and new developments.

My name is Paul Mumford, I'm the Project Director for Waterbeach. We’re near to Cambridge, which is always an area where surface water has to be managed and just over and behind where we are is the edge of the Fen and we had reports of localised flooding.

So there's already something we needed to think about. What we've tried to do is use this pond as one of our really important parts of our water management and flood management system.

When we think about nature-based solutions, the way I look at it is nature-based solutions need to work with what we might have done anyway.

So, for large housing developments we do need to put some concrete in the ground, we do need to make sure, particularly where the houses are.

But by doing it the way we have done it where we've raised the land level, we've allowed the water to fall off the land under gravity and then collect in this pond and then we can plant the species around it to give us our ecological and biodiversity benefit.

The benefits of nature-based solutions is nature will restore, it will regenerate. Often, they don't require as much cost to maintain them and also to put them in in the first place.

But we need to support it, we need to maintain it. A key thing here is it is not just about a place that we hold water. When it gets really interesting as well is it's good for people.

We're having people much closer to water bodies than you might otherwise have had. In a sense, we're reimagining our relationship with water.

To scale-up nature-based solutions there is a number of challenges we need to overcome. So they can be around the incentives to invest.

We need to make sure that there's stronger regulation, and we need to make sure that we are addressing the data gaps and really giving the evidence that these work.

The only way we're going to solve this is by everybody coming together and taking collective action. Nature-based solutions actually deliver biodiversity, carbon storage and nutrient mitigation but also, making it a nicer place to live. 

These actions that we need to take are not UK specific. They need to be implemented across the whole world. They're all challenges that every country needs to overcome. We can all learn from each other and draw from each other's knowledge to address water management and addressing the impacts of climate change and nature loss.