RRC Blog

Today RRC attended a webinar hosted by the All-Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group (APPCCG), focusing on the launch of the Nature-based Solution Report from RSPB and Cambridge Econometrics. Fiona Harvey chaired the webinar, opening the session by highlighting that Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are a beneficial approach to mitigating the impacts of climate change, and how there is an economics concept to NbS.

Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP, talked about the costs and benefits of NbS....

Earlier this week, I attended an online talk from Catie Gutmann Roberts, Bournemouth University. Catie’s research looked at the movement and diet of barbel on a stretch of the Severn/Teme which was impacted by barriers to flow.

Barbel are not native to the western flowing rivers of the UK and don’t tolerate salt water so hadn’t got round to the west coast. In the 1950s the Rivers Authority at the time brought barbel over from the River Kennet to the River Severn for angling opportunities (moved about 500 barbel)....

Guest blog - Natural Resources Wales

With the long history of industrial heritage in Wales, our rivers are some of the most modified in the World. These physical modifications, which include changes to geomorphology and hydrology of the rivers is the main reason for WFD failures in Wales. NRW has prioritised focus and improvement of these issues in order to increase resilience of freshwater habitat and species. As the body responsible for ensuring that Wales natural resources are conserved and brought into a high standard, NRW...

Today NERC held a webinar, with Dr Stewart Clarke (National Trust) presenting on Natural Flood Management (NFM) and the land manager’s perspective. Stewart opened his presentation by outlining what NFM means, including slowing the flow, temporarily storing it, and filtering water in wetlands and floodplains to try and improve water quality.

National Trust are a major landowner (250,000ha), and look to implement catchment management and landscape scale solutions to achieve multiple benefits...

Earlier this week, on World Wetlands Day, CIEEM held an online conference looking at a range of topics focused on river recovery and bringing our rivers back to life. Penny Lewns, Vice President of CIEEM opened the morning session, with Max Wade, CIEEM President chairing the afternoon.

Anthropogenic effects are apparent in many natural habitats and are having impacts over many years. Freshwater systems are vulnerable to these impacts, and their interconnected nature means effects can be felt over a large...

Earthwatch hosted this webinar today on nature-based solutions for water quality improvements. Dr Steven Loiselle, Senior Research Lead at Earthwater Europe opened the webinar by mentioning the growing problems with water quality across the globe, and the impacts on society and economy. This can relate to excess pollutants entering watercourses due to fragmented land management, and Wastewater Treatment plants.

Maintaining good water quality in rivers and lakes is useful to providing us with benefits such as...

Dr Tom Nisbet from Forest Research, working on the Landwise NFM project, presented a webinar today on Woodlands and NFM. Tom went through the base mechanisms of how woodlands can effect flood conveyance.

Reducing the volume of flood water at source by increasing evaporation

The amount of interception annually changes with rainfall, however on average conifers intercept 35% and broadleaf about 17% of rainfall. Tom also mentioned the different soil water storage of different plants such as grass,...