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Mapping
The first role of a Catchment
Commissioner is to map the potential
for investment in natural wealth in
their area. Detailed mapping will be
necessary to identify where there are
problems (such as flood risk, poor air
and water quality, or lack of quality
green space) and which natural
capital assets can be improved to
alleviate those problems (such as
wetland creation or tree-planting):
ecological opportunity mapping.
Ecological opportunity mapping
can coordinate investment to deliver
multiple benefits. By stacking up
different data, it can help locate
the areas where the benefits of
investment are clearest. For example,
wetland creation can simultaneously
reduce flood risk, filter out diffuse
pollution, provide habitat, and give
local people a wonderful new place
to enjoy.
Understanding how a catchment
works is essential to ensuring the
right interventions are made—a
commissioner will need to know how
water flows, how habitats connect,
and how people interact with their
surroundings. Commissioners should
draw on local knowledge to bring the
mapping to life.
In this way, Commissioners will
identify synergies and prioritise sites
for investment, they will integrate
funding, reach agreement with local
landowners and commission the
scale of natural capital investment
needed at catchment scale.
Catchment Commissioners
To achieve improvements across
the country in accordance with local
conditions and national priorities,
Catchment Commissioners should
be appointed with landscape-
scale responsibility. For example,
there could be 14 Catchment
Commissioners—one for each of
Natural England’s work areas. The
Commissioners could sit within
Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs),
Natural England, or the Environment
Agency. More important is that they
have access to local expertise and
funding to create widespread, long-
term change.
They will look up to shared
environmental targets, and down
to on-the-ground delivery, achieving
national targets in locally-appropriate
ways. They require three core powers
and responsibilities:
Mapping:
identifying multi-benefit,
long-term investments.
Coordinating:
making sure that
environmental plans are integrated
at development stage.
Commissioning:
ensuring long-term
funding for projects to improve land
and water management.
However our relationship with the EU evolves,
the CAP system of farm support must surely change.
Our money must reward farmers for all the public
goods they deliver, not just production and land-
holding. Our countryside is about so much more than
production—Catchment Commissioners can target
spending to reward those who work with the land
to invest in our natural wealth.