The Kent and Pas-de-Calais regions face similar water management challenges including flooding, drought and pollution of waterways, which damage our shared ecosystem, the Channel, and affect local communities and businesses alike. Flooding alone costs millions of euros in the UK and France annually. Traditional water management through hard engineering can be expensive and ineffective, especially as the climate changes, populations grow, and more land is developed as towns and cities grow.
The H20:Source2Sea project is demonstrating how solutions based on nature can reduce water management costs while improving freshwater quality, reducing pollution, and benefiting the wildlife and local communities. In the UK and France the project is implementing a range of nature-based solutions such as wetland creation and restoration, hedgerow planting and leaky woody dams.
Nature-based solutions targeted at flood risk are capable of supporting a wide range of benefits beyond just managing water flow in a catchment. A natural capital approach – which treats the environment as an asset that provides a flow of benefits that can be measured and valued - provides a way to understand and measure the benefits of nature-based solutions, first by determining the baseline value (the value of what is already there), and then by estimating the change in value from implementing the nature-based solution.
This online tool presents a range of benefits and estimated values from implementing different nature-based solutions at a landscape scale across the Kent and Pas-de-Calais regions.