Scheme to help restoration of three rivers on Cotswold farmland
The Government-backed initiative brings together more than 50 tenants, farmers and other land managers to help tackle intensive flooding
Work has begun to restore the Evenlode, Glyme and Dorn rivers across farmland in the North Cotswolds as part of a flagship Government programme.
The Evenlode project brings together more than 50 tenants, farmers and other land managers to help tackle intensive flooding, soil erosion, declining water quality and biodiversity loss across more than 3,000 hectares of land.
These land managers, who are part of the North East Cotswold Farmer Cluster, are expected to receive a share of £100 million in public funding over the next 20 years, to undertake a variety of measures such as reconnecting the river to flood plains and planting trees, pasture and other habitats upstream to help manage water flow and boost wildlife.
Farmers in the cluster say some of their fields have flooded nine years out of the last ten, with one reporting that a single field flooded nine times during the winter of 2023-24 alone.
Aside from protecting farmland, bringing some of it back into agricultural use and restoring nature, it is also hoped the funding will help to attract innovative forms of private finance, ultimately supporting emerging nature markets.
Tim Coates, a director of the North East Cotswold Farmer Cluster and a farmer himself based outside Chipping Norton, said the project is not only one of the first in a large pipeline of landscape recovery projects, but it has also achieved the complex task of pulling together dozens of land managers through the right incentives to carry out restoration work at a landscape scale.
“We are showing how river restoration creates that bigger, better and more joined up,” he told the Press Association.
“We are right in the middle of lowland England where there is competing land use so this can be replicated across other areas of the country.”
Officials from the Environment Agency, Environment Department and Natural England visited one of the fields covered in floodwater as part of the project launch on Tuesday.
Alan Lovell, chairman of the Environment Agency, which played a leading role in the project’s development phase, told PA: “This is a joint effort of many parties.
“We strongly back farm clusters around the country wherever we can and I think the way in which they have got together here to produce this project is a really strong plus.”
Evenlode is the third and largest yet in a series of projects to move to the implementation stage of the taxpayer-funded “landscape recovery” programme.
Landscape recovery forms part of the wider post-Brexit environmental land management scheme which has replaced EU-era agricultural subsidies.
The landscape recovery arm of the scheme aims to back projects that restore nature across whole landscapes and draw in private finance to support the work, as part of efforts to meet legal targets to halt declines in wildlife.
The first project, announced last year, is focused on rewilding 600 hectares in the Boothby Wildland project in Lincolnshire, and the second involves nature restoration on 2,800 hectares of upland in Upper Duddon, Cumbria.
For the Evenlode project, the landscape covers a variety of habitats, including woodland, limestone grasslands, lowland meadows and fens, and the planned work aims to support endangered species such a native crayfish, water voles and fen violet.
The initiative also seeks to engage local communities, with hundreds of miles of footpaths threaded through the project area featuring QR codes that link to stories, educational resources and pictures from the project.
Tim Field, facilitator of the North East Cotswold Farmer Cluster, said the farmers are allowing the rivers to flood certain plains, meaning they are “effectively sacrificing what was an arable field to the flood water”.
When wet, these areas will attract wading birds and other wildlife but also capture river sediment full of pollution, phosphates and nitrogen that can feed the grass while removing these pollutants from the watercourse before it flows downstream, he said.
On the other hand, livestock will be able to graze on the grass crops when it is dry and floodplain meadow flowers will spring up, supporting insects and pollinators.
“Of course, this is all capturing lots of carbon through the wetlands (and) through the grasslands,” he said.
Upstream, Mr Field said the work focuses on tributaries in the steeper slopes, creating stormwater storage areas in the edge of fields as well as planting 250 hectares of trees and a further 500 hectares of pasture and wood parkland.
“That will change the land use, or will increase the landscape’s absorbency of those flood waters, but also store it for those drought years as well,” he said.
“We’re trying to encourage the water to stay in the landscape, not go down the stream.”
Government landscape recovery funding will help the scheme to get off the ground but over time, it will seek private funding from multiple sources.
This will include the sale of “biodiversity net gain” credits under a scheme which requires developers to boost nature when carrying out housing or other projects and “carbon” sales, where high-emitting organisations pay for carbon-absorbing nature restoration.