The Rivers Trust is the umbrella organisation for 65+ individual member river trusts and a strong advocate for Natural Flood Management (NFM). This nature-based approach to minimising flood risks involves building ‘leaky barriers’, planting trees and implementing other nature-based flow management measures, to slow, intercept and store flood water upstream and, thereby, reduce flood risks for communities downstream.

As an expert in river catchment conservation, The Rivers Trust has a wealth of data at its disposal that can be used to inform the implementation of NFM schemes. It wanted to make this insight available to member river trusts, local conservation groups and residents to help them track NFM projects. At the same time, the organisation also wanted to improve collaboration between groups working in similar locations, to accelerate the implementation of NFM schemes and improve their effectiveness.

The Rivers Trust is a longstanding user of Esri’s geographic information system (GIS) technology. With support and funding from the Environment Agency, it used Esri’s ArcGIS Hub Premium and ArcGIS Experience Builder solutions to create a national database of information on river catchments, including NFM projects that are planned, in progress or completed throughout England and Wales, so far.

Called the NFM Hub, the solution was specifically designed to be easy to use by people without any experience of GIS. It is now used by around 80 groups, and growing, from member river trusts and conservation charities to small community-led flood action groups, enabling all these organisations to discover information about their local river environments and gather evidence of the need for nature-based solutions such as wetlands, river meandering and riparian tree planting.

Within the NFM Hub, each organisation has secure access to its own dashboards and can view information visually on interactive maps. Users can take advantage of integrated survey forms, built with ArcGIS Survey123, to collect and upload information about their own projects. They can explore other nearby projects, identify opportunities for collaboration and edit their own data all in one place.

Currently, the NFM Hub shows the locations of more than 5,700 NFM interventions and records the creation of over 1.7 million m3 of water storage and more than 43.3 million m3 of surface ‘roughness’ for slowing the flow of flood water. “The NFM Hub is the largest map database of community-managed nature-based solutions that we are aware of,” says Heather Bell, Senior Technical Analyst at The Rivers Trust.

Easy access to river catchment data
The NFM Hub provides local organisations with easy access to high quality data and evidence that they can use to inform new NFM schemes and better protect communities. For example, the Wyre Rivers Trust has used the NFM Hub in its work with the Churchtown Flood Action Group, a group formed to help prevent a repeat of the devasting flooding of 2015. “ArcGIS is an incredibly powerful tool,” says Thomas Myerscough, General Manager of Wyre Rivers Trust. “We couldn’t have done anything about the issues seen in our catchment without looking at data and evidence.”

Improved collaboration between organisations
As the above example clearly illustrates, the NFM Hub is proving highly effective in supporting and facilitating collaboration between river trusts and community groups. “It’s only by working together that we are actually going to see the changes that we need in the environment,” observes Bell. “The NFM Hub makes sure that everyone can see what is happening in their local area and maximises opportunities for collaboration.”

Effective empowerment of local communities
The NFM Hub has empowered local communities, including residents, landowners and volunteers, to drive change, by giving them the information they need in a format that is easy to understand. Andrew Metcalf is a farmer in Wyresdale, who has been supporting the creation of leaky dams, buffer strips and woodland blocks on his land. “To see it on a map puts it all into place,” he says. “From the Wyre Rivers Trust to farmers to individual people in the communities, we can do so much if we work together.”

A mechanism for attracting investment
By recording planned NFM projects, as well as completed ones, the NFM Hub displays a pipeline of investible projects which investors can see and then fund. Consequently, The River Trust’s work on the NFM Hub has provided a mechanism to encourage investment in regional NFM projects. The Wyre NFM project, mentioned above, has successfully raised £1.5million of green and blended finance and uses the NFM Hub to engage with stakeholders.

Accelerated delivery of nature-based solutions
The Rivers Trust anticipates that the NFM Hub will ultimately help to accelerate the delivery of nature-based flood solutions, by speeding up the process of engaging with stakeholders and contributing to faster decision-making. The NFM Hub will support a data- and evidence-based approach to the collaborative delivery of NFM that is already being used to plan and deliver £25 million of future investment, which will hopefully increase in the future as confidence in Nature Based Solutions grows.