Environmental Land Management Schemes: Flood Control

(asked on 8th February 2023) - View Source

Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether payments available for farmers to create new habitat to (a) hold flood water and (b) enhance the capacity of existing habitat for holding flood water under the Environmental Land Management Scheme.


Answered by
Mark Spencer Portrait
Mark Spencer
Minister of State (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
This question was answered on 20th February 2023

Yes, the Environmental Land Management schemes will pay farmers and land managers for a number of actions to increase resilience to flooding through nature-based solutions such as natural flood management. The Countryside Stewardship (CS) scheme already has a number of grants which help manage flood risk on land, including through the creation, restoration and management of habitat such as fenland, reedbeds, inter-tidal habitat, scrub, and river and wetland habitats. As we enhance CS going forward, we will continue to pay for flood mitigation efforts through habitat creation and management. In addition to what is already available in CS and the Sustainable Farming Incentive, we plan to pay for new actions including, for example, enhancing floodwater storage, slowing the flow through maintaining the roughness of ground and sphagnum in the uplands, restoration and management of peatland, management of floodplain meadows and grassland for flood resilience, and restoration of coastal cliff habitats. The first competitive round of Landscape Recovery in 2022 awarded funding to 22 projects which collectively aim, among other environmental benefits, to restore over 400 miles of rivers. Landscape Recovery round two, which will open this year, will focus on net zero, protected sites, and habitat creation, which could include projects creating and enhancing peatland, nature reserves and protected sites such as wetlands and salt marshes. We published further detail of what we will pay for in the Environmental Land Management Update in January 2023.

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