From Roots To Riverbanks

How joining up individual nature projects has much bigger benefits for communities and nature.

Local nature-based solutions at a landscape level are one of the most powerful ways to tackle the twin crises of climate change and nature loss whilst providing multiple benefits for people as well as wildlife. From restoring woodlands and wetlands to bringing back beavers and rebuilding marine habitats, the idea is to take a more interconnected approach in working with and alongside nature.

Even at scale, we can become focused on an individual intervention: planting trees here, restoring a riverbank there, reintroducing a species somewhere else. These projects can be valuable in their own right, but nature does not work in our neat project boundaries.

Rivers connect hillsides to estuaries. Woodlands influence water flowing into the sea. Wetlands affect flood risk downstream. Farmers, communities, businesses and wildlife all depend on the same landscapes, even if they experience them in very different ways.

If nature-based solutions are going to help us respond to climate change and biodiversity loss at the scale required, we need to think bigger locally. We need to think in landscapes and where land meets water, in catchments and seascapes too.

From individual projects to connected systems

A landscape perspective begins with a simple shift in mindset. Instead of asking, “What nature-based solution could work in this specific area?” we ask, “What is happening across the whole system and how can nature help us achieve multiple outcomes at once?”

This connected approach matters because the environmental challenges we face are rarely confined to one place. Take flooding. A flood risk problem in a town may have its origins much further upstream, where land management influences how quickly rainwater reaches a river. Improving soils, restoring wetlands, reconnecting floodplains or changing woodland management could all influence what happens downstream.

Or take declining coastal ecosystems. Looking only at the sea might lead us to focus on marine restoration. But what happens on the land can determine what reaches the coast through rivers: nutrients, sediment, pollutants and freshwater. The health of the sea depends partly on decisions being made many miles inland.

And then there are people. Landscapes are not simply collections of habitats. They are places where people farm, work, travel, live, recreate and build communities. Any wider conservation approach that ignores these relationships is unlikely to succeed over the long term.

Taking a wholescape approach

Rather than treating nature recovery as a series of isolated sites, WWF-UK is working across whole areas in Norfolk, Pembrokeshire and the Firth of Forth. Its innovative Wholescape Programme is looking beyond individual habitats to bringing together land, rivers, coasts, seas and the communities that depend on them.

In Norfolk, for example, the challenge is particularly interconnected. The county is an important food-producing landscape, contains freshwater and coastal ecosystems, and is vulnerable to climate impacts because of its low-lying geography.

WWF-UK, working with delivery partners Norfolk Rivers Trust is exploring how working at landscape and seascape levels helps identify solutions that benefit nature, climate and people simultaneously. A wetland is not just a wetland. It can be wildlife habitat, flood infrastructure, carbon storage, water-quality improvement and a place for people to connect with nature. A river is not just a channel for carrying water or dumping waste. It’s part of a system connecting farms, communities, freshwater habitats, estuaries and the sea. A farm is not simply a site for food production. How it’s managed influences local biodiversity, water quality, carbon capture, flood risk and the resilience of the wider landscape.

Shaping seascapes on dry land

The No Trees No Seas campaign by Plant One in Cornwall takes this connected-systems idea and makes it particularly tangible. Its central message is deliberately provocative: the key to healing our seas lies on the land.

At first glance, restoring woodland and restoring marine ecosystems might appear to be completely separate activities. One belongs in the hills and valleys; the other belongs beneath the waves.

But follow the water. Rain falls on woodland and soils, enters streams and rivers, travels through catchments and eventually reaches estuaries and the sea. What happens along that journey affects the health of downstream ecosystems.

The campaign describes these connections through the idea of a ‘flowscape’: a living system in which life and energy flow from forest floors into headwaters, rivers and estuaries, out towards the ocean and back again. It argues that Britain contains hundreds of these connected flowscapes, each linking a headwater catchment to the sea.

This is the kind of perspective that can transform how we think about nature-based solutions. Planting or restoring woodland is no longer simply about putting trees on land. In the right location, restoring native, species-rich woodland can help influence water flows, reduce erosion and sediment movement, support biodiversity and improve the conditions that ultimately affect downstream freshwater and marine habitats.

The No Trees No Seas campaign highlights the connections between forests, rivers, fish, seabirds and marine ecosystems, and is using this thinking to guide woodland restoration in Cornwall.

Once we see the connections, the question changes from “Where should we plant trees?” to “Where could woodland restoration create the greatest benefits across the whole system?” That’s a more interesting question with a much bigger potential impact.

Collaborating with nature

The same landscape thinking can apply in our towns and cities too, as the Ealing Beaver Project demonstrates in urban Greenford, London. In October 2023, a family of Eurasian beavers was introduced in a 10-hectare site within the local Horsenden Hill landscape.

Beavers are not simply another species to add to a list. They are ecosystem engineers. Through their feeding and dam-building activities, they alter water movement and create a mosaic of ponds, wetlands, deadwood, shrubs and woodland.

The Ealing project has three explicit objectives: mitigating flooding, boosting biodiversity and engaging local people with nature and nature-based solutions. This combination is significant. A conventional conservation project might have focused primarily on the ecological benefits of bringing beavers back. But the Ealing project is asking a broader question: how can a keystone species help an urban community become more resilient whilst also restoring biodiversity?

That is a landscape question. The site itself occupies a low-lying basin, making water management particularly relevant. The project is investigating how beavers can help mitigate flooding and drought while monitoring their effects within an urban catchment.

There’s another benefit that is sometimes overlooked: imagination. Seeing beavers living in London challenges the idea that nature recovery belongs somewhere remote and rural. It demonstrates that nature-based landscape solutions can happen in places where millions of people live.

Bringing landscape thinking into your community

Carbon Copy is keen to help you bring this kind of connected approach to implementing nature projects in our own area. We are hosting a Community-to-Community Workshop where you can learn directly from those who have successfully implemented landscape thinking to connecting nature-based solutions. Harborough Woodland is a community organisation working with partners in Leicestershire to plant more trees, reduce local flood risk and to boost biodiversity in ways that work for communities and wildlife.

If you are involved in individual nature-based solutions and interested in a more joined-up local landscape approach, then this free online session on October 20 might be for you!

Find out more and register.