Calming the flood-drought climate whiplash

Today, this ecological breakdown is no longer just an environmental issue – the UK Government has recognised it as a direct threat to our national security and resilience[2]. From compromised food supply and supply chain disruption to the devastating impacts on homes and businesses, our degraded water systems leave the nation dangerously exposed to climate shocks. Crucially, the costs of inaction are spiralling. 

In the UK, flooding alone accounts for around GBP1.4 billion in annual losses[3] and in 2025 wildfires are said to have cost £460 million[4]. And yet, one of the most powerful, cost-effective defences we have is nature itself. By committing to rewilding and the mass restoration of our natural ecosystems – re-establishing spongy peatlands, wet woodlands, and free-flowing rivers – we can repair the landscape, help secure our water future, and build our long-term climate resilience.

An underlying issue is that, for centuries, land management across Britain has prioritised one main hydrological objective: getting water off the land as quickly as possible.

Over hundreds of years we’ve straightened, dredged and embanked our rivers. We’ve gouged thousands of miles of drainage ditches across our upland peat bogs and farmland to dry them out for grazing and ploughing. We’ve actively pumped water off the land – losing over 90% of our wetlands in the process[5]. We’ve also removed native woodlands from the upper reaches of our rivers, compacted our agricultural soils and cleared woody debris from our streams.

When heavy rains hit, soil degradation and a lack of vegetation mean that water cannot sink into the ground. On compacted or drained ground, rain simply sheets off the surface and flashes down canalised rivers into lowland towns in a sudden, destructive flood peak. The impacts don’t stop when the rain stops. Because the landscape has shed its water rather than storing it in underground aquifers, peatlands, soils and floodplains, there is no reserve left. When summer dry spells arrive, already depleted water tables plunge, rivers reduce to trickles more quickly, wildfire risks rise and ecosystems collapse into drought. 

If we continue to only treat this as a grey-engineering challenge – throwing billions of pounds at concrete flood defences and water storage while ignoring the degraded catchments above them – we’ll remain caught on a treadmill of escalating costs and recurring devastation for people and communities. Ending this cycle requires us to be strategic about how we use our land. It isn’t about choosing one priority over another – it’s about balancing demands and working within our landscapes’ natural ecological limits.

Protecting our prime land and soils for food and timber production is, of course, vital. But continuing to farm marginal upper catchments and flood-prone land yields minimal food and creates major downstream risks. Extreme weather in these areas can lead to a net loss in food production[6], while inflicting catastrophic damage on the lives, livelihoods, and mental health of affected communities[7]. When we measure the productivity of land holistically – weighing food security alongside flood protection, drought resilience, carbon storage, wildfire containment, water quality, local economies and wellbeing – restoring our hydrological systems can yield far greater long-term value. In these areas, rewetting and rewilding is a highly productive use of the land. 

So isn’t it time to transform our countryside from a funnel into a sponge? 

The long-term solution to Britain’s water crisis can’t just be to build bigger concrete culverts; it must be found in also restoring natural hydrological processes at a catchment scale. 

Over time, rewilding restores the natural mechanisms that slow, spread and store water where it falls. By blocking upland drainage ditches, re-meandering canalised rivers, re-establishing wet woodlands and allowing vegetation structure to diversify, we turn rivers back into dynamic living systems.

Crucially, restoring water systems cannot happen in isolated, site-based pockets. Water doesn’t respect property lines or administrative boundaries; it flows across entire catchments, connecting high moorlands, farmland, nature reserves and urban centres downstream. That’s why building hydrological resilience requires catchment-scale, multi-landowner, cross-organisational, community-led collaboration. Not to mention a number of key ecological processes and allies!

Nowhere is this collaboration more evident than in the return of the beaver. Where beavers are reintroduced to river catchments, they act as master hydrologists. By felling trees, digging channels, and building leaky wood dams, beaver families create complex wetland networks that fundamentally alter how water moves through the landscape.

Rewilding is not a replacement for hard engineering solutions. But it does have the potential to help mitigate hydrological extremes by allowing natural processes to function[8]. Restoring natural water systems can help transform a volatile flood-drought cycle into year-round hydrological resilience. Here’s how:

We are already seeing the transformative results that happen when landowners, conservation NGOs, local communities, and statutory bodies come together to let natural processes take the lead. This same catchment-wide approach flows right down to our coasts and intertidal waters. 

While coastal defences in the UK still rely heavily on sea walls, naturally functioning saltmarshes, sand dunes, oyster reefs, seagrass beds and kelp forests buffer storm surges and absorb wave energy naturally. Recent research shows that saltmarshes are among the most effective coastal flood protection barriers available, breaking wave energy by up to 60% and reducing the need for expensive artificial engineering[16].

Restoring natural water systems can help to build a multi-layered defense against a rising tide of climate shocks. Crucially, it protects against both extremes – floods and droughts – at the same time. Of course we do still need hard engineering solutions like flood barriers and concrete reservoirs, particularly at the bottom of river catchments. This isn’t a case of one or the other. And yet, despite its compelling ecological and economic benefits, restoring hydrological resilience remains pitifully underfunded. For example, natural flood management (NFM) receives under 1% of total UK flood risk management funding. However, restoring natural processes can deliver value for money compared to hard defences; installing 27 manmade leaky dams as part of a natural flood management project in Herefordshire cost just £2,180 while significantly reducing flood peaks. Research suggests that NFM projects can have an average total cost-benefit ratio of 4:1 over 10 years, rising to 10:1 over 30 years[17]. 

Real change won’t happen overnight. It requires long-term commitment, proper funding and genuine support for the land managers and local communities on the ground. To shift from short-term firefighting to lasting landscape resilience, decision-makers must take joined-up action across four priority areas:

We cannot concrete our way out of the climate crisis. Every winter deluge and every summer drought sends the same unmistakable message: our traditional ways of managing land and water are not fit for the multiple challenges we face in the 21st century.

Restoring nature and rewilding across our water catchments offers a proven, cost-effective and inspiring way forward. By rewetting our spongy upland peat, giving rivers room to meander, restoring our wetlands, allowing our wet woodlands to regenerate and welcoming back beavers as ecosystem engineers that keep water in the land, we can build our resilience to the destructive cycle of flood and drought. In doing so, these restored landscapes will continuously sequester and lock away large amounts of atmospheric carbon, tackling the root causes of climate breakdown.

For a wilder landscape is not just a richer home for nature – it is our best national defence against an unpredictable climate.