Catchment Resilience Project
Led by Westcountry Rivers Trust, this project investigates nature-based responses to climate change in our local rivers and landscape.
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This will help us develop changes to land management, farming practices and re-wilding to improve carbon capture and increase our resilience to floods and droughts.
Bude Catchment
Climate Resilience Review
This in-depth scientific analysis of our area’s natural resources and geographic characteristics provides us with a vital toolkit that we can use to future-proof Bude with nature-based solutions to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Working with land-owners, farmers and the community, these maps can be used to guide prioritisation and action in the area.
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Developed by our partner Westcountry Rivers Trust, this work examines in detail various critical features in our landscape and waterways. The area stretches from north of Morwenstow to south of Higher Crackington, and inland to the east as far as the Devon border. This project is part of Bude Climate Partnership's work to investigate, test and develop ways to protect the wider Bude area and community against the impact of climate change. Like all our work, it is supported by The National Lottery Community Fund’s Climate Action Fund.
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The following page provides a summary of the review and highlights the key findings, to read the full report please click the button at the top of the page.
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The next phase of this work is to engage with land owners and farmers in high opportunity areas and to work with them to identify the nature-base solutions that will maximise resilience in that area.
Cornwall is already suffering from the visible impacts of a changing climate such as increased flooding, wind, rain and storm intensities. Yet there are also hidden impacts such as droughts, bio-security, invasive species, and seasonal changes to the food chains for species. Cornwall acts as a weather-break and break-water for the south of the UK, and is particularly susceptible to flood risk from intense rainfall and coastal communities are at risk from storms and erosion.
The analysis performed for this project focuses on the themes of;
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Flooding
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Drought
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Water Quality
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Biodiversity
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Carbon
These threats are best suited to this type of analysis and other threats will be investigated through further projects in the Bude Climate Partnership development and implementation stages. Sea level rise and the resulting coastal erosion is a key threat in the Bude CNA and although it is not covered here there is already work in progress by the Environment Agency.
Natural capital, ecosystem services & nature-based solutions
Natural capital describes ‘the elements of nature that directly or indirectly produce value to people’. This includes the land, soils, freshwater, air, oceans, habitats, species and ecological communities.
Ecosystems are a community or group of living organisms that live in and interact with each other in a specific environment.
Ecosystem services are the 'functions and products from nature that can be turned into benefits for people'. This includes the provision of clean water.
The ability of ecosystems to provide these benefits is affected by where it is, how much of it there is and the quality or condition it is in.
Climate change poses a threat to the ecosystem in our landscape and therefore the services we benefit from. To increase the resilience of communities like Bude to climate change we must work together to protect, enhance and restore our natural environment in a way that also supports biodiversity and future climate change adaptation.
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We can do this through nature based solutions, which involve working with nature to address societal challenges, providing benefits for both human and wildlife. They are actions that are underpinned by biodiversity and are designed and implemented with the engagement and consent of local communities.
The types of solutions we can used depend on the specific location within the landscape, the natural features present and the conditions experienced in that location. The opportunity maps created by our analysis highlights areas where a nature-based solutions will help to address the threats climate change poses to Bude CNA.
The graphic to the right shows what sort of naturebased solutions can be used to address these threats.
Come and explore Bude’s natural assets
Scroll down through this page to explore the natural assets of the Bude CNA.
Click on the boxed and underlined text to activate map features (you can click them again to turn them off).
You can also navigate around the maps using your mouse to zoom in and out and click and drag to move around.
