Natural Flood Management requires delivery of small interventions, with lots of landowners across several sites at small scales solving local problems, but to deliver meaningful reductions in Flood Risk for the River Aire at Leeds we needed to totally reframe the way NFM is delivered and crucially need to have no silos or barriers to collaboration with those partners.
As part of the industry leading Leeds Natural Flood Management (NFM) programme, we produced an innovative solution for managing the implementation of NFM. We developed an online collaborative platform to manage the delivery of NFM across hundreds of sites and implement thousands of NFM measures throughout the 700km2 River Aire catchment to reduce flood risk to Leeds and deliver valuable complimentary benefits for local communities and the environment.
To support the delivery of the largest NFM programme in England we developed NFM Sites. This web-based platform provided an end-to-end solution that was used by the Environment Agency and the White Rose Forest ‘Landowner Engagement Team’ (LET) to identify and work with landowners to plan and deliver NFM. This work stands out because it doesn’t just involve integration with clients and the traditional ‘big organisations’ but driving vertical integration for charities and organisations that otherwise wouldn’t get chance to be central to such projects or would be included for some small token activities. The NFM Sites platform provides a seamless integrated collaborative workspace for project partners which enables all partners to play to their strengths on a level playing field.
Three Winning Facts:
- SMEs and charities brought on as a key part of project delivery forming a Landowner Engagement Team (LET) to identify a pipeline of sites to implement NFM works on.
- NFM Sites platform providing a level playing field for the wide range project team members, meaning that the burden of record keeping, and health and safety planning can be supported by organisations with specialist expertise.
- The Project has developed a long-term future via the Special Purpose Vehicle which will capture private investment for flood risk and environmental enhancement across the River Aire Catchment and for the people of West Yorkshire spreading benefits and much needed investment from the cities into rural areas.
