Wetland is better than dry in managing water

Posted by Northumberland Wildlife Trust on Jul 21, 11 08:30 AM in Bloggers

By Conservation Officer Kevin O'Hara

One of the hardest things to do in conservation is to try to repair the damage of the past.

Why this can be so difficult probably falls into two areas.

One is quite obviously the limitations of cost, and the second - which can be equally difficult - is trying to convince people that there is a problem which needs to be remedied.

Two recent examples spring to mind, one of which is quite large and the other quite local, but both are equally negative examples of previous landscape modification.
I was asked to pass on some experience of urban watercourse modification to a colleague at a site in Cramlington - the Horton Burn.

I have had dealings along this Burn in the past and it has to be the worst example of post-80s planning and development I can readily think of.

It really is something you would have expected to see in post-war engineering in inner-city Birmingham, or somewhere similar.

It is a straightened and largely culverted length of stream, within a trapezoidal embanked constraint, with concrete flow obstructors throughout.

How any of it got through planning is a mystery, but this highlights, particularly in working with water, that these beliefs and attitudes in providing an engineered solution still exist, and still prevail.

So bad is its present condition that there was little comfort I could give to my colleague that would not entail a hugely expensive capital works programme of obstruction removal, channel realignment and offline water storage.

We constantly work with developers and designers to ensure these scenarios are avoided but inevitably things slip through under the "cheap and nasty" option.

Another area very pertinent in today's changing climate is convincing people that wetland is a better flood alleviation than "dryland", or more precisely drained land.

In very simple terms, wetlands hold in more water than drylands and despite our somewhat inclement weather in the UK, most of our land is dry, or more precisely, drained!

This is one of the conundrums we have to explain as people, understandably in some cases, start to panic at the word "flood".

We prefer to say "rewet" or "rehydrate" ... a bit like a Pot Noodle or that space-age food they take up Mount Everest.

From a purely ecological perspective it's a perception we have to change if we are to avoid further species losses and declines.

The environment has become marginalised, viewed as a luxury that we only concern ourselves with in times of prosperity.

But the natural environment and wetlands in particular underpin that prosperity and our wellbeing; regardless of what we think is important, history tells us differently.

We need innovative partnerships between business, charity and Government that are restoring wetlands and not drylands.

They are the way forward and we need more of them.

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