A bottom up approach for engineering catchments through sustainable runoff management

There is no doubt that our catchments are under great stress. There have been many accounts around the world of severe flood events and water quality issues within channels. As a result of these, ecological habitats in rivers are also under pressure. Within the United Kingdom, all these issues have been identified as key target areas for policy. Traditionally this has been managed by a policy driven top down approach which is usually ineffective. A one ‘size fits all’ attitude often does not work. This paper presents a case study in northern England whereby a bottom up approach is applied to multipurpose managing of catchments at the source (in the order of 1-10km2). This includes simultaneous tackling of water quality, flooding and ecological issues by creating sustainable runoff management solutions such as storage ponds, wetlands, beaver dams and willow riparian features. In order to identify the prevailing issues in a specific catchment, full and transparent stakeholder engagement is essential, with everybody who has a vested interest in the catchment being involved from the beginning. These problems can then be dealt with through the use of a novel catchment management toolkit, which is transferable to similar scale catchments. However, evidence collected on the ground also allows for upscaling of the toolkit. The process gathers the scientific evidence about the effectiveness of existing or new measures, which can really change the catchment functions. Still, we need to get better at communicating the science to policy makers and policy therefore must facilitate a bottom up approach to land and water management. We show a test site for this approach in the Belford burn catchment (6km2), northern England. This catchment has problems with flooding and water quality. Increased sediment loads are affecting the nearby estuary which is an important ecological zone and numerous floods have affected the local village. A catchment engineering toolkit has been developed that puts in place novel measures to tackle diffuse pollution and reduce flood risk whilst collecting the science needed to influence the policy about these measures. This has been possible through four key practices: full stakeholder engagement, a problem solving agenda set in place, a bottom up approach to solving problems, and the collection of the appropriate science to support the benefits. Hands on, multi-objective work is the most cost effective way to manage catchments. Tackling water quality issues and controlling fast pathway runoff at the source in partnership with farmers and local landowners has proved to be the key to success. Tackling issues in sub-catchments can lead to solving problems at the catchment scale.