Agriculture’s requirement for a more robust and resilient water supply.
Integrated Storm Water Management is an ever-increasing requirement as the effects of climate change take hold. One such mechanism is to slow the flow of water, allowing the downstream water more time to process the increasing water volume from the storm event, thereby reducing the potential for flooding. Everyone, including farmers, can also reap the Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) benefit of drought resilience, by harvesting rainfall for later use.
The government has introduced a Countryside Stewardship grant system.
Countryside Stewardship scheme opens for 2023 agreements – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
Countryside Stewardship: get funding to protect and improve the land you manage – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
Their aim is to help promote water efficiencies in the agriculture sector. Some of the schemes are quite rewarding when coupled together, covering most of the cost of deployment, installation and product supply cost, especially when it’s proven to have a positive effect on downstream flooding and influences the amount of water abstracted, making the supply of water more resilient.
Climate change is expected to get worse and the UK will see more extreme weather events; acting now will have greater long-term benefits.
How you optimise the existing drainage network is getting SMART.
Nature provides a lot of the solutions with green vegetative SuDS that help absorb or capture, retain and use the water, generating habitats for wildlife and insects that help with pollination, while also filtering out the day-to-day pollution we see from our surface water runoff. No one solution can cope on its own, it needs a holistic catchment approach to both flooding and drought, making our drainage network more robust and the supply of water more resilient.
