The potential for reducing flood risk through changes to rural land management: outcomes from the Flood Risk Management Research Consortium

Changes to rural land management are widely perceived as an effective complement to, or even replacement for, traditional flood defence and flood-risk related sediment management actions. This is implicit in recent reports and legislation that influence UK FRM policy and practice, for example the Pitt Report (2008), the EU Floods Directive (2009) and the Floods and Water Act (2010). However, an extensive Defra review published in 2004 concluded that evidence to support the value of land management in this context was at that time extremely limited. This lack of evidence has been addressed by research initiatives between 2004 and 2012 including, particularly, research performed by the Flood Risk Management Research Consortium (FRMRC: www.floodrisk.org.uk). This paper provides an overview of the new evidence provided by FRMRC and other recent research, and evaluates the significance of the main findings. Upland experimental programmes have shown that land use management changes can have significant impacts on flood generation at the local scale; increases or decreases in flood peaks can result, depending on the nature of the changes. However, at the catchment scale, any benefits to flood risk management from local scale mitigation measures are likely to be small, due to the direct effect of scale itself and the transmission effects in propagating change through the river channel network. Modelling results for a large lowland catchment confirm the latter findings. However, when a broader view of catchment management is taken that encompasses linkages to sediments and a range of ecosystem services, it is evident that significant benefits could result from an integrated management approach. Priorities for the research needed to quantify these benefits are outlined.