Flooding & Natural Flood Management

The challenge & why we’re doing this

Flood risk is increasing across the UK, driven by climate change, land use, and more intense rainfall events. In places like North Devon, flooding is a catchment-wide issue - shaped not just by river channels, but by how water moves across land, through soils, and into rivers over time.

While Natural Flood Management (NFM) has strong potential - slowing, storing, and filtering water in the landscape - it remains difficult to scale. Key challenges include:

• Limited visibility of how catchments actually respond to rainfall
• Weak connections between upstream land management and downstream flood risk
• Lack of shared, accessible information for communities and decision-makers
• Difficulty demonstrating and attributing the impact of interventions

As a result, flood risk management is often reactive and fragmented, and the role of landowners and catchment processes is under-recognised.

Our aim is to change this - by making flood systems visible, understandable, and collectively managed at catchment scale.

What we’re doing

Through the Smart Biosphere, we are developing a Braunton Flood & Natural Flood Management Dashboard - a practical proof of concept designed to make flood risk, and the role of the catchment, clear and accessible.

The aim is simple: to show how rainfall moves through the catchment and translates into flood risk downstream.

The dashboard brings together four core elements:

Real-time and historic river data. We integrate Environment Agency gauge data from Braunton (Butts Bridge) at 15-minute intervals, providing a continuous picture of river levels over time.

A clear, locally relevant definition of flooding. Flooding is defined using agreed river height thresholds, creating a simple and transparent way to identify when flooding occurs.

This allows us to move from abstract risk to a shared, evidence-based understanding of actual flood events.

Simple, meaningful metrics. We translate complex data into metrics people can understand, including:

• Frequency of flooding events
• Duration of flooding
• Changes in flood patterns over time

This helps communities, land managers, and decision-makers engage with the issue in a practical way.

Catchment-wide rainfall analysis. We link rainfall data across the catchment to river response downstream — showing:

• How much rain fell
• How quickly rivers responded
• How different rainfall patterns translate into flood risk

This creates something that doesn’t currently exist for Braunton: a clear, integrated picture of how the catchment behaves over time.

What this enables

By bringing these elements together, the dashboard creates a foundation for more effective flood management.

It enables:

• Tracking change over time - understanding how flood behaviour is evolving in response to climate change
• Linking cause and effect - clarifying the relationship between rainfall, land use, and downstream flooding
• Assessing Natural Flood Management - beginning to understand how interventions (e.g. leaky dams, soil management, woodland creation) influence catchment performance
• Improving coordination - providing a shared evidence base for communities, landowners, local authorities, and regulators

A key goal of this work is to support the scaling of Natural Flood Management.

This requires more than individual projects - it requires the right system conditions:

• Better understanding - clear, accessible insight into how catchments function
• Stronger connections - linking upstream land management with downstream impacts and communities
• Growing demand - building awareness and shared ownership of flood risk
• Recognition of action - making visible the contribution of landowners who take steps to manage water and reduce risk

By creating visibility and shared understanding, we can begin to build the foundation for more effective policy, funding, and long-term investment in catchment-based flood management.

Expected outputs

This work will deliver:

• A public-facing flood dashboard for Braunton - clear, accessible insight into river levels, rainfall, and flood events
• A shared definition and record of flooding - consistent metrics on frequency and duration of flood events
• Catchment-scale understanding of flood dynamics - linking rainfall patterns to river response over time
• Improved basis for Natural Flood Management - evidence to support the design, targeting, and evaluation of interventions
• Recognition and engagement - greater visibility of landowner action and community involvement
• A replicable model - an approach that can be applied to other flood-prone catchments across the UK

Get involved

We are developing and refining this approach and welcome collaboration.

If you are:

• A landowner or farmer interested in Natural Flood Management
• A local authority, flood risk manager, or regulator
• A community group in a flood-affected area
• A funder or organisation interested in scaling NFM
• Exploring how this model could be applied elsewhere

We’d love to hear from you: naturalcapital@devon.gov.uk