Increase flood resilience with Natural Flood Management
Natural flood management (NFM) uses natural processes to reduce the risk of flooding. These processes protect, restore, and mimic the natural functions of catchments, floodplains and the coast to slow and store water.
NFM measures can include:
NFM can also provide wider benefits including:
Slowing the flow with leaky dams within the Surrey Hills area. Photo credit: Andrew Turton, Defra Communications
In September 2023 the Environment Agency and Defra announced £25 million funding for improving flood resilience through a new NFM programme.
The Environment Agency is managing this programme.
The NFM Programme will help meet the aims of the National Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy (FCERM) for England.
The programme will build on and apply what we learnt from the £15 million NFM pilot programme, which included 60 projects between 2017 and 2021.
We want people and places to make greater use of nature-based solutions. This will help enhance flood and coast resilience and nature recovery as set out in the FCERM Strategy Roadmap to 2026.
The programme aims to:
Eligible NFM measures include:
You can find out more in the NFM prospectus.
We invited applications from a wide range of groups, including:
There was huge interest with a wide variety of applications from across England. We independently reviewed these with input from Defra and Natural England technical experts.
Thirty-six project business cases are complete. The teams are getting ready to carry out work on the ground.
These are:
We are also working with 2 projects to make their business cases stronger.
These are:
A variety of communities and habitats will benefit from these 38 projects across England. They cover urban to rural, upland to lowland and inland to coastal locations.
These projects will carry out a mixture of NFM measures at a range of scales. They will seek to manage flood risk from a variety of sources including from rivers, surface water and the sea.
The measures include:
Work will take place on these projects between now and 31 March 2027. This will involve a range of organisations including:
- wildlife trusts
- rivers trusts
- local authorities working with local communities
- farmers
- landowners
