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Delivering the scale and breadth
of change needed to grow
our natural wealth—contributing
to biodiversity, water quality,
air quality, public health, and
flood management—will require
widespread action and investment
in land-use change. However,
the environment is made up of
complex, interwoven systems.
Changing one piece of the puzzle
can have myriad effects, often
with unexpected consequences.
This complexity has led Governments to split
up the problem, dealing with aspects of the
natural environment one-by-one: action for
wetland wildlife is often separate from work
on water quality, which is separate again from
flood risk alleviation. While not all solutions to
environmental problems require an integrated
approach (for example, if a wetland species is
declining due to factor unrelated to its habitat,
like overharvesting or lead poisoning) many of
them do. Lack of integration can be seriously
inefficient, leading to costly, short-term, and
untargeted projects.
Effective environmental improvement will
require joined-up action, using local knowledge
to improve whole environmental systems:
a landscape or catchment approach. Part of
the answer will be creating and protecting
new areas of high-quality habitats, like large
wetlands, but just as important will be changing
the way we manage the wider landscape.
Achieving change will sometimes need
regulation, but this should be complemented
by fairer financial incentives that reward land
managers who invest in our natural wealth. At
the moment, good land management often
goes unrewarded. Farmers who invest in
nature receive some money from the Common
Agricultural Policy (CAP), but many ways of
investing in natural wealth are not remunerated.
Where farmers are willing to use their fields for
flood storage, or to create wetlands to filter our
water, then we need to recognise that they are
delivering a service and afford them a long-
term, secure income for doing so.
For example, flood prevention funding is
often allocated inefficiently. Projects that
would deliver multiple benefits are overlooked
because funding tends to be issue-specific,
short-term, poorly focused and based on
conventional cost-benefit analysis. We know
that natural approaches, working alongside
conventional flood defences, can deliver flood
reduction benefits, but these benefits are
widespread and long-term. They need to be
incentivised for the long-term, sometimes on
large-scale.
So, to link up local knowledge with national
priorities, coordinate different objectives
and commission and reward change across
the landscape, we propose new Catchment
Commissioners.
Commissioners will be a lynchpin in
local investment in nature, creating new
commercial opportunities for investment
in natural capital. Long-term revenues for
natural capital investment will help land-
managers to diversify the income they
receive from managing their land well.
5(*,21$/ $&7,21
Catchment Commissioners