A thought for World Wetlands Day

Walking through Westminster last week, I saw a large display of wellington boots.  It had been put together by Greenpeace showcasing personal testimonies from flood-hit communities and was accompanied by a call for more government action to protect people from flooding.

Admiring the installation, my eyes were drawn to a card about Hebden Bridge - a community that has suffered from flooding in recent years and is in the foothills of the intensively managed Walshaw Moor Estate.  

This is the same Estate that is the subject of a complaint made by the RSPB to the European Commission over the management agreement that was struck between Natural England and the Estate in 2012 (which I first aired here).  We have made the case that burning is inconsistent with obligations under the EU Habitats and Species Directive to restore peatlands (for example see here).

This case is still being investigated by the European Commission but there is strong evidence that restoring internationally important peatlands would not only help wildlife but also safeguard nature's free services that well-managed peatlands provide - such as locking up carbon, providing clear drinking water, and keeping water for longer on the hill to prevent downstream flooding. Research by Leeds University has revealed that just a 10% increase in Sphagnum moss cover in buffer strips next to water courses can reduce peak flows by over 7% and also delay the time it takes for streams to reach peak flow.  Sphagnum is an important peat-forming species and it is known (here) that changes in the hydrological properties of the peat after fire make the peat less conducive to Sphagnum moss growth.

It is notoriously difficult to scale up these trials to see how much benefit you would achieve across a catchment but what is clear is that restoring wetlands would benefit wildlife, water company customers (see here) and could make a significant contribution to alleviating downstream flood risk.

The good news is that there seems to be a growing recognition of the role of land management in flood risk management.  Last week, the terms of reference for the Westminster Government’s National Flood Resilience Review was published.  In the press release, it said that the Review (to be chaired by Cabinet Secretary, Oliver Letwin) "will align closely with Defra’s work on integrated catchment-level management of the water cycle in the government’s 25 year Environment Plan".  We'll engage with this review as well as participating in the Cumbrian Floods Partnership.  This will be an opportunity to work with others to demonstrate the role that catchment management must play in protecting communities at risk of flooding, including the contribution that our own land management can make at Haweswater and Geltsdale. 

Haweswater by Andy Hay (rspb-images.com)

Our experience of natural flood management is not, however, restricted to the uplands.  I've written (here) about how land managed for nature helped protect parts of the Suffolk coast in the 2013 tidal surge but we also manage several floodplain washlands in partnership with the Environment Agency from the Aire and Dearne valleys in Yorkshire to parts of the Ouse and Nene Washes in Cambridgeshire. These sites are designed so that in normal conditions they are managed as wetland nature reserves, providing homes for wildlife and a recreational resource for people but in times of exceptionally heavy rainfall they take in water from the surrounding river network, flooding the sites, often under several metres of water but hopefully keeping that water out of towns and villages downstream. 

These sites were designed to reduce the risk of damaging flooding but they have become fantastic places for wildlife. In fact, they have become so important that many of them, like the blanket bogs of the Pennines, have been designated under the European Nature Directives as some of our most important places for nature. 

Today, the European parliament will be voting on a mid-term review of the EU’s Biodiversity Strategy. There is lots to recommend in the report, among which a request for EU leaders to listen to the half a million citizens calling for the laws that defend nature to be protected and better implemented.

So, I hope that politicians note that today is World Wetlands Day* and mark it by remembering the incredible value that wetlands offer to people and the importance of the laws that protect them.  

* World Wetlands Day has taken place annually on 2 February since 1997.  It marks the date of the signing of the first multilateral international conservation convention in the Iranian city of Ramsar on the shores of the Caspian Sea in 1971. There are now 169 signatories from across the world. The Ramsar Convention was designed to address the alarming rate at which wetlands were being lost across the world.  Yet, from the outset, it was acknowledged that loss of wetlands was just as likely to be damaging to a nation’s economy and culture as to its wildlife.