Natural Flood Management

Why Natural Flood Management?

A river is made of water flowing through the catchment and flooding often the result of too much water reaching pinch points all at once. Looking at the whole of the catchment, natural flood management alleviates the pressure by slowing the flow of water.

This gives communities precious time to prepare, lowers the flood peak and reduces the likelihood of water entering homes and businesses.

While natural flood management is not a silver bullet, its capacity to hold water in the landscape plays an important role in flood risk reduction and nature recovery. By holding soil on land, it can help improve water quality, restore habitat and create a more natural catchment.

Slowing water in-channel to prevent water rushing through
Temporarily storing water using ponds, ditches, wetlands, and flood plains.
Interrupting overland flow by planting buffer strips, or creating bunds.
Increasing soil infiltration to reduce surface runoff.
Evaporation from vegetation and soil can also make space for water.

What we do to slow the flow

NFM is not the complete solution to reducing flood risk. It is one of many tools needed to manage flood events. Used in conjunction with other flood management solutions (such as hard engineering, land use planning and sustainable urban drainage schemes), NFM will have a beneficial impact on slowing the flow of flood water downstream.

Our work depends on good relationships with communities at risk, local authorities, the Environment Agency and landowners. We work on solutions which work alongside those looking after the land and address the concerns and opportunities natural flood management can provide.

We are able to deliver natural flood management work from conception to completion:

We scope opportunities based on careful modelling work, landowner knowledge and the groundtruthed insight.

Our team of technical specialists delivers natural flood management capital work within the Trent region.

Where possible, we monitor the impact of our work long-term