A Day in the Life of an Environmental Consultant – September 2022

A river runs beneath it. This is one of many grand old trees on the Hammer Stream.

The last two months I have been busy exploring rivers around Headcorn and Paddock Wood in Kent for the Upper Medway Internal Drainage Board. The Board under their Clerk Oliver Pantrey, has exciting and forward-thinking ideas to become a champion of river restoration, creating healthier, wildlife rich rivers while at the same time reducing some of the flooding issues that have caused real problems across the Upper Medway Catchment.

The rivers I surveyed varied from twisting gravel lined streams where old oaks overhung the water providing ideal lying up spots for otters to overly wide and sluggish channels heavily polluted by phosphates from farming and sewage treatment with impoundments blocking fish passage.

We have to be realistic. Some of these problems are harder to rectify than others. Discharge from water treatment plants and unsustainable building on flood plains need a national will to push a greener agenda that our Government is completely lacking. However, there is much that can be done, from slowing flood waters from entering our rivers by putting woody debris in side channels to restoring rivers to their historical width ensuring that they suffer less in periods of drought and less silt drops out of the water, which in turn creates healthier rivers with less in-channel weed growth that can block channels and create flood issues during period of summer rainfall.

As our weather gets less predictable, we need to ensure our rivers can adapt to more frequent flood events and, ideally work with landowners to store water in the flood plain where it does least harm.

Out on the marshes my mind turned to plans to undertake wetland restoration projects which will improve conditions for lapwing and other waders to breed. It has taken years to get all the paperwork and funding lined up to take this work forward and I very much hope that we can now make a start and get these projects underway so we don’t all have to witness another dry spring and lost opportunities to improve the fortunes of these iconic birds.

The last lapwing. These birds deserve a better spring.

These frustrations were overshadowed at the end of the month by the announcements from Liz Truss’s Government that they planned to scrap the laws that protect much of the land I work on and push forward deregulation of the planning system across much of England. There are also strong suggestions from Defra that they plan to do away with years of hard work by rescinding on their promises to use tax payers money to support farmers to do the things that benefit us all, such as clean water, healthier soils and managing the land to benefit wildlife. Instead they seem about to continue with a broken system of paying farmers based on how much land they own, once again benefitting the richest and largest landowners.

There is huge anger across both the conservation and farming community that all the promises are being torn up and I immediately wrote to my MP to voice my deep concerns. To be honest, after these announcements I was so disillusioned I felt a real loss of motivation to continue with my work. When people in Government can act with such ignorance and blindness and set about destroying all you have worked for it is hard not to feel ‘what’s the point.’

However, being a natural optimist, I plan to set about working doubly hard on the things that I do have control over and look forward to putting together a programme of work to improve our rivers this autumn.