Flooding Challenges After Storm Chandra

Following Storm Chandra, which caused homes to flood, roads to become impassable, and schools to close, the question of how to manage the increasing likelihood of floods has once again come to the forefront.

Climate change is contributing to warmer, wetter winters, resulting in more frequent flooding events as rivers overflow their banks.

Expert Insights on River Management

Professor David Sear, a physical geography expert at the University of Southampton, explained that rivers will continue to be affected by "extremes of flooding, more extremes of drought."

"We've got to allow the water to go out onto its floodplain, flow more slowly, and make sure that the land surface around is able to store more water and release it more slowly," he said.

The Wild Woodbury Project

One initiative addressing this is the Wild Woodbury project, which spans over 170 hectares at Bere Regis in Dorset.

This stage-0 river restoration aims to improve water quality, store carbon, and create new wildlife habitats upstream on the River Sherford, while also benefiting communities downstream.

The project involved redirecting water from existing ditches in what was previously typical farmland, allowing it to flow freely over the land.

The unconstrained water was permitted to find its own paths and naturally re-establish old routes across the fields.

Immediate Benefits Observed

Project manager Rob Farrington noted that the positive effects were visible almost immediately, with water in various streams and pools becoming so clear it "looked like gin."

"The water leaving our land before this restoration used to zoom down the drainage channels and the ditches incredibly quickly flooding the minor roads," he said.

"Slowing the water down and spreading it out not only creates this fantastic place for wildlife but those minor roads have not flooded since we've done this because the land acts like a sponge."

Farrington emphasized that the work helps mitigate both droughts and floods.

"So when there's plentiful rain, the water spreads out on our land and slowly and in a controlled manner goes on down," said Farrington.

"By slowing it down, it gives the land the ability to remove excess nutrients, so it's filtering it, it's cleaning it.

"And wetter soils can sequester and store more carbon."

Scope and Limitations

The restored area now includes about 50 hectares of wetland within the 270 hectares managed by the trust. However, the trust acknowledges that this approach may not be feasible everywhere.

"That's a lot of space but then we're on a very flat open area here," Farrington said.

"In other areas, you're just not going to be able to get that benefit, so you need to be weighing up the cost of doing the activity and what you're going to win."

"In some instances, we may have built a road or houses on floodplains. It's obviously not feasible to do it," he added.

Despite these limitations, Farrington insists the scheme provides a "massive benefit," improving water quality in rivers and coastal areas downstream towards Poole Harbour.

Broader Perspective on Flood Management

Professor Sear cautioned that while such projects are valuable, they alone are insufficient to address the broader challenges posed by climate change.

"Just doing things at isolated locations seems like a great idea at that location but it's not necessarily treating the scale at which the challenge is being produced," he said.

"So we've got to join all these bits together, including, where necessary, some hard engineering but we can do it better now in order to be able to allow these rivers to adapt to this changing climate."

He also stressed the importance of ending construction on floodplains to reduce risk and providing protection for existing properties.

"When you look at an old map, you notice that all the villages and the old churches and structures like that, they are built outside the floodplain because they knew that was the winter riverbed," he said.

"Now, if you think of floodplains as the winter riverbed, why would you build in a riverbed?

"At the rate we're going, we're not going to be able to achieve the scales of change needed to address flooding, to address the nutrient problems and to address the biodiversity crisis unless we scale up.

"But we can't do it through diggers and lots of high-energy, high-cost things. We've got to do stuff working with natural processes."

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