GovWire

Natural Flood Management (NFM) can manage flood and coastal erosion risk by protecting, restoring and emulating the natural processes of:

• catchments
• rivers
• floodplains
• coasts

It includes:

• the re-meandering of rivers
• the restoration of wetlands
• targeted woodland planting

Between 2017 and 2021, we invested 15 million of government funding in 60 pilots that made up the NFM Programme. The pilots explored a variety of catchment and community scale activities to help reduce flood and coastal erosion risk.

This evaluation report brings together the successes and challenges from the pilots to help those delivering NFM projects in the future.

The learning from the evaluation is also being embedded in the Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation (FCRIP) Programme. This includes FCRIP projects looking at NFM catchment scale innovation.