Joint efforts successfully use nature to hold off floods in Gissing village
Monday February 26th, 2024
Amidst a winter of exceptionally high rainfall in Norfolk, the River Waveney Trust (RWT) and Norfolk Rivers Trust (NRT) joined forces, in collaboration with WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) and Aviva, to proactively protect the village of Gissing, in south Norfolk, from flooding.
Through effective collaboration with the local community, landowners and parish council, the two trusts successfully delivered a Natural Flood Management (NFM) project in October 2023, using low-cost natural solutions to make the landscape more flood resilient. The interventions installed at Gissing proved that natural solutions can be effective at protecting communities from the fast increasing risk of flooding.
This initiative was made possible by a partnership between WWF and Aviva, who joined forces in 2021 to develop projects that work with nature to help reduce the effects of extreme weather, particularly flooding, on communities in the UK. The project received funding from the partnership, as well as the Environment Agency and Garfield Weston Foundation, enabling the creation of new flood relief channels and water storage areas, aiming to reduce flood risk for the village and its surrounding areas.
Natural Flood Management: a sustainable shield against flooding
Unlike conventional flood prevention measures that often involve heavy infrastructure and a substantial cost, NFM uses natural processes, such as restoring wetlands, reconnecting floodplains, planting trees and improving soil health, to slow down, store and filter water.
In Gissing, the NFM intervention designed by the River Waveney Trust and Norfolk Rivers Trust faced its first significant test during the arrival of Storm Babet. The deluge of rain, resulting in high volumes of surface water, found refuge in an adjacent meadow, where it could be temporarily stored and released gradually to reduce the flood peak. During a flood event in December 2020, 6 properties were internally flooded in Gissing, whereas, since this installation at Gissing, no flooding has been reported despite the arrival of 8 named storms, including Storm Babet.
Emily Winter, Catchment Officer at the River Waveney Trust, said: “Following the terrible floods in December 2020, we were approached by members of the public to help relieve flood pressure on homes in Gissing by reconnecting the local stream to its floodplain. We planned to lower the stream banks in strategic places to allow peaks of high water to escape onto the surrounding meadow land. We also installed a leaky dam, reconnected a dry, historic channel and created new shallow depressions, which we call scrapes, to slow and store water. The work was completed in September, and we weren’t expecting it to be put to the test so quickly, but we’re really pleased to see it working as we’d hoped. This has been a fantastic example of a relatively simple and low-cost project that will have far-reaching, positive impacts for the local community. We’re also confident the farmers involved can be rewarded through the government’s Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) programme, for providing an ecosystem service for public good.”
Water level gauge
New floodplain attenuation wetland
Jonathan Cole, landowner at Gissing, said: “The heavy rainfall provided an earlier test than perhaps any of us expected. The diversion of the watercourse into the historic channels on the school meadow performed exactly as had been specified by The River Waveney Trust and Norfolk Rivers Trust.”
Malcolm Turton, landowner at Gissing, said: “The scrapes filled as expected from both the new shallow channel and from the bank lowering further downstream, both of which allowed water to overflow the bank and into the scrapes.”
Looking ahead
Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of rainfall. This, coupled with the alterations that humans have made to the landscape, causes rainwater to enter our river systems much quicker than it would do naturally. The imperative to rethink our approach to flood management has never been more urgent.
Steve Walker, Nature Based Solutions Officer at Norfolk Rivers Trust, said: “The NFM project at Gissing demonstrates the effectiveness of low-cost, nature-based measures in providing practical and sustainable solutions for mitigating the challenges posed by climate change. However, joined up policy and planning, along with active community engagement, is needed to scale-up the adoption of these measures so that flood peaks can be reduced across entire river catchments.”
