A BID to reduce flooding across the county including at Barbourne Brook in Worcester has been handed a £500,000 funding boost from the Government.
Worcestershire has been chosen as one of 26 projects in England to be backed by a recent £15million DEFRA allocation for Natural Flood Management (NFM) projects.
The aim of the project is to hold back water in upstream areas by applying natural methods in order to ‘slow the flow’ and reduce the risk of flooding downstream. NFM includes coppicing riverside trees to create leaky structures in the watercourse, tree planting on steep slopes to intercept surface water, diversion of high flows into natural floodplain areas and fencing to exclude livestock from rivers and streams.
The funding, which runs up to March 2021, will also allow the benefits of different natural flood management techniques to be evaluated.
The project will focus on three core areas which are known to suffer from flood risk and water quality issues and where it is thought that natural flood management techniques will be effective – the Barbourne Brook, the Dowles Brook in the Wyre Forest and a cluster of River Avon tributaries which includes the Badsey Brook, Merry Brook and the River Isbourne.
County Council cabinet member for the Environment Coun Tony Miller said: “We’ve been looking at more natural ways to reduce flood risk for some time but this excellent project will help us to accelerate this and do it on a much larger scale.
“Whilst the Worcestershire Natural Flood Management Project will focus on the three main catchment areas, natural flood management will be advanced at other locations too and be further embedded into our tool box for reducing flood risk across the county.”
The project is a multi-agency community focused partnership involving Worcestershire County Council, Wychavon District Council, Gloucestershire County Council and Tewkesbury Borough Council, the Environment Agency, Natural England and local community groups.
Visit www.worcestershire.gov.uk/flooding for more.
