For the second winter in three years, floods have heaped misery on parts of the country. I have never been flooded so obviously have no idea how appalling it must be. One can only feel huge sympathy for those affected as well as admiration for the way that the emergency services have responded over the Christmas period.
While there has been a little political jousting about the levels of investment in flood protection, there seems to be growing consensus that we need to think differently about our approach to flood risk management. All climate change models predict milder, wetter, stormier winters and a quick look of the Met Office list of extreme weather records (here) tells you that these predictions are borne out by reality.
It's clear our flood prevention strategy needs to adapt accordingly. And there are many case studies from which we can learn including Pickering in North Yorkshire, profiled by Geoffrey Lean in today's Independent on Sunday (here), which showed how working with nature helped to keep the town dry.
So, the Government's promised national flood resilience review is an opportunity to assess whether we have adequate plans in place to...
...focus flood defence resources on protecting lives, homes, businesses and utilities
...slow the water flow upstream to reduce peak floods for example by keeping water on the hills for longer
...use the existing water management infrastructure better by spreading flood water more appropriately when it reaches the floodplain
...build greater resilience in the floodplain land uses, especially in farming
...maintain critical watercourses to ensure appropriate levels of drainage
These ideas featured in our joint Flooding in Focus report and will inevitably feature in discussions with Environment Minister, Rory Stewart, later this week when a range of organisations, including the RSPB, will offer their thoughts on how our flood resilience strategy should evolve.
Yet, I cannot help thinking that this latest deluge should trigger a wider debate in 2016 about the way we use and manage land.
There are so many competing uses of land - for building houses and infrastructure, for generating energy, for growing food and timber, for providing and storing water, for recreation as well as providing sufficient habitat for wildlife.
Having separate strategies for different uses of land no longer seems appropriate - we need a better way of reconciling different pressures on land. This is one of the reasons why I have argued that the two Defra 25 year plans for food and farming and for nature, should be combined. It is surely time that we developed a more integrated approach to land use to help us get the best from this finite resource.
Politicians have previously flirted with such a concept for example when David Miliband was Environment Secretary in 2006-7 opened up a fresh debate about what land is for. Then, in 2011, during Caroline Spelman's time as Environment Secretary, the National Ecosystem Assessment was published. This outlined the range of free services that we get from terrestrial and marine ecosystems, suggested that a third of our natural assets were degraded and that we needed to think very different to optimise the value from nature.
From a wildlife perspective, we know we need more, bigger, better and joined protected areas, perhaps covering up to sixth of our terrestrial area (target 11 in the global plan for nature). And, we need to make the intervening land must be hospitable for wildlife. Government is keen to renew infrastructure and address the housing crisis by providing 200,000 new homes a year. It also wants to grow more high quality food, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from land use, respond to sea level rise, secure adequate flood defence whilst delivering adequate supplies of clean drinking water. And the Paris climate change agreement signalled a fossil fuel free future, we will need to think hard about how to harness the power of the wind, tides and sun to generate our energy.
The planning system is meant to be the way these choices are made but it is limited as it has little say on what happens on agricultural/forested land or shooting estates where the management of land may support or degrade the services that nature gives us for free. The current planning system is clearly failing to deliver for wildlife as our review (here) of local plans pointed out last year.
Having a national land use strategy, especially if expressed spatially, would help guide incentives (such subsidies for environmentally sensitive farming and renewable energy) and planning decisions. It would not, of course, be a prescriptive plan, but would provide context for local action and give encouragement to local authorities, government agencies, businesses and civil society to work together to make choices about to get the best value from the land. It might even help identify where current sectoral policies are failing and where reform is urgently needed - top of my list would, of course, be the Common Agriculture Policy. A national spatial plan is not a new idea, is something that other countries have adopted (see here) and is one that we have advocated for over decade.
As ever, the RSPB shall continue to test solutions for how to manage the land for multiple purposes. We've shown that it is possible to farm for food and wildlife (at Hope Farm), that you can improve water quality whilst recovering wildlife populations (in the Peak District and the Forest of Bowland) and now our partnership with United Utilities at Haweswater (shown above) on the Eastern Edge of the Lake District is seeking (as described in our new management plan here) to develop a system of upland land management that delivers improved water quality, wildlife, carbon storage and recreation, alongside food production.
My hope for 2016, is that politicians move beyond sectoral interests, think about what land is for and help us get the most from what is - for people and wildlife - our shared home.
It does seem obvious, doesn't it ? But Sir James Bevan's 'people before wildlife' comment may sadly presage the state of things to come: in particular, a ferocious resistance to any change to agriculture and its financial support. Compared to the tiny area devoted to wildlife, farming covers 70% of our land surface and, supported by public money, has succeeded in speeding water off the land, from the overgrazed uplands of sheep farming and grouse shooting, through fast run-off maize to grassland drained for arable in the crucial flood plains of the middle reaches of rivers like the Severn and the Thames. A bitter irony that the water flowing through victims living rooms was put there by the subsidies their taxes have funded !