By Martin de Returto, lead for fresh water at Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust

THE recent floods saw communities and businesses suffering greatly while the cost to people’s lives and the UK taxpayer grew.

Just as before, recent media coverage, centred on a blame game between climate change, flood defence investment, dredging and so on – but the majority of commentators ignored the 'elephant in the room'; land management.

The reality is that decades of disjointed land use planning, unsustainable agricultural practice and continued modification of our river catchments are exacerbating the effects of climate change.

We’ve removed the ability of our floodplains to contain and regulate the impacts of flood peaks while in parallel attempting to engineer a future-proof system facilitating more and more development and intensive agriculture, often in the wrong place and at great expense.

Our alternative, the 'catchment approach' is not a new concept.

For many years Wildlife Trusts have been driving forward projects to improve river water quality, enhance wildlife habitats and reconnect rivers with their floodplains.

For example at Winnall Moors Nature Reserve (immediately upstream of Winchester city centre), we recently completed a six year floodplain restoration project.

We restored part of the historic water system, by rebuilding working sluices, opening carrier ditches and reinstating livestock grazing to the floodplain.

We also removed flood embankments along the river and raised the riverbed along previously dredged river sections (largely former flood defence activities of the 1960 & 70s).

At face value this work was about wildlife and habitats; Atlantic salmon, sea trout, otters, water voles, flower rich fen grassland, reedbeds, alder woodland and so on all benefitted.

But we’d also argued that this work was benefitting Winchester by reconnecting the river with its floodplain.

The 2014/15 winter floods saw Winnall Moors eventually became a single lake – opening up the floodplain held back the water from homes and businesses in the city.

This again proved the benefits of managing rivers better.

This is not to say that engineered measures are not part of the solution.

In today’s modern landscape they are necessary – but must be planned as part of a strategy that restores the natural functionality and services of floodplains and their surrounding catchments.

This should include addressing land use that exacerbates flooding, and changes that have physically hindered floodplains from doing the job of flooding.

The reality we face is that two in five of England and Wales’ rivers have no functional floodplain.

Many more are fragmented and modified beyond recognition – and even our most important and protected rivers not being managed holistically.

Meanwhile the evidence base for natural flood management is growing, and is ignored at our peril.