The Environment Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) Select Committee’s report, Future Flood Prevention, recently recommended a complete overhaul of how we tackle flooding. Amongst the recommendations was that we should take a more holistic approach to managing flood risk, including incorporating natural flood management (NFM) into the toolkit.
NFM is about how we delay and speed up water flow through a catchment to reduce the peaks of water that often cause flooding. We are seeing growing interest in it amongst our flood action groups because it is often more affordable than hard-engineered defences and it gives people a sense of ownership, purpose and practical involvement in reducing their flood risk.
We are working with many communities to assess the viability of these schemes for their catchments and in this edition, we take a more in depth look at what has worked, how communities are getting involved and new tools that are being developed to help map catchments.
Click to read the National Flood Forum Bulletin November 2016
