Rewilding in a climate crisis

Project delays in Somerset

This blog post tells the story of a setback in our partner rewilding project in Somerset, and how it highlights the interconnected relationship between climate change and biodiversity loss.

Flooding delays

We have had to delay the creation of a network of scrapes in Athelney, our partner site run by Somerset Wildlands.

Scrapes are shallow pools which hold water for longer periods throughout the year, creating a habitat for insects, amphibians, birds and fish. The desired outcome from this work is to accelerate the process of natural recovery in this degraded landscape and reduce the flooding & drought load in the surrounding area.

Nestled in the floodplains of the Somerset Levels, the site undergoes a dramatic seasonal transformation. Each year, the land transforms into a shallow lake, sometimes reaching depths of 4 meters, typically between December and February. As Spring approaches, the water recedes, revealing dry land once more. Creating the scrapes requires heavy machinery, which can only operate on solid ground, and to minimise wildlife disruption, we should have had an eight-week window between the receding floodwaters and the resurgence of wildlife activity in spring.

A wet & grey day at Athelney.

However, following the warmest winter on record and the wettest winter since 1836, our window to create the scrapes has entirely disappeared. Spring has come early, and the site is still under water. As a result, we need to delay the scrape creation until next winter and hope for more standard weather patterns. 

Fortunately we have a strong plan B, pivoting to fund further ecological benchmarking at the site, using EDNA sampling to understand the breadth of life that we already have. This is a valuable project which will give us greater understanding of the positive impact that the scrapes have on the site’s biological diversity, but the delay is frustrating nonetheless and highlights how our warming climate is already affecting us.

How climate change leads to wetter winters

On average, the UK’s Winters are getting warmer & wetter. As the atmosphere warms it holds more moisture, at a rate of 7% more moisture for every degree of warming. As a result, every record-breakingly warm Winter of the past 20 years has been accompanied with heavier and more frequent rainfall, leading to a spike in flooding & water pollution.

With no indication that warming is slowing, we can expect heavier and more frequent rainfall in the years to come. The UK is catastrophically unprepared for this. 

How a warmer climate leads to heavier rain. Source, https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/

The UK’s winters are becoming simultaneously wetter and warmer.

One only needs to take a train journey to see how much of the UK is already affected by flooding. On average, we lose 35,000 HA of agricultural land lost every 3 years, a figure which is expected to rise to 130,000 HA by 2050. This will be devastating for food production & sovereignty. (1)

Flooded fields in Powys, Wales, in the aftermath of Storm Babet. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

The problem is worsened by the terrible state of our water works. In 2022 our creaking water systems pumped untreated sewage into our rivers 400,000 times (2), triggering ecosystem collapse in some catchment areas. Across the country, our infrastructure doesn’t split rain water from sewage, so the more rain we get, the greater volume of sewage we need to treat. Because of this and other factors like chronic underinvestment and a policy loophole, the water works are legally allowed to dump sewage into our rivers every time it rains. With heavier and more frequent rain expected, even billions of investment in our infrastructure will struggle to abate this problem.

Compounding the problem is a deadly combination of land management practices that have devastated our land’s ability to store & slowly release heavy rainfall. In 500 years, we’ve drained 90% of our wetlands, grazed our uplands of any semblance of vegetation, straightened our rivers and concreted our floodplains with roads and housing developments. These combined activities ensure that rainfall is channeled into our rivers as fast as possible, creating flooding events from normal periods of rainfall.

In essence, the activities which are causing biodiversity loss & climate change (intensive farming & urban development) are also reducing our ability to handle the effects of these crises. This perverse feedback loop can only be broken by urgent & dramatic emissions reductions and scaled rewilding to help our farms & towns handle increased rainfall events. In reality, this means we are going to have to dedicate more unproductive land as designated wetlands, in order to give productive farms & urban areas greater protection. For more detail on how rewilding combats flooding, read more in this blog: Rewilding - our best solution to flooding and water pollution

Conclusions

This project delay is one of thousands of examples of how linked climate change & biodiversity loss are. Our scrape project was designed to create habitat to combat biodiversity loss, whilst retaining water for longer periods of time and reducing flooding load in the surrounding area. But our warming climate has meant that we’ve had to delay the work.

This is a compounding circle to the bottom; the more we delay scaling nature based solutions, the harder it will be to implement the solutions we need. Urgency is absolutely key, or else we risk seeing our window to solve the biodiversity & climate crises vanish as well. 

(1) https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN03763/SN03763.pdf

(2) https://www.sas.org.uk/updates/2023-water-quality-report/