Climate change is bringing heavier rainfall to the UK and increasing the likelihood of floods – one in six homes is at risk of flooding. We face spiralling costs for constructing ever-higher defences to protect us from the risk of our rivers overflowing their banks at times of high rainfall.

Traditional approaches of rushing water off the land by increasing drainage, and deepening and straightening river channels, with the aim of taking water downstream as quickly as possible only increases the volume of floodwater, making it even more dangerous for communities downstream should the defences fail.

The Netherlands faces similar flooding risks and has a densely populated and intensively farmed landscape like ours. The Dutch have been holding back the water for 800 years or more by constructing dykes and flood barriers. But in the face of climate change, they have adopted a new approach they call ‘Room for Rivers’ that could work here too.

The Dutch aim to restore the natural function of floodplains to hold back the floodwaters by creating space for rivers to safely overflow their banks, alleviating the risk of flooding further downstream. The Dutch government is moving agriculture out of the floodplains by buying up farmland alongside rivers. In the UK we could adapt this approach by scaling up the land management payments we already make to a very few farmers to store water on their land.

This means some productive farmland will be lost, but it will protect a much larger area of fertile land at risk of flooding and spare towns and communities downstream. According to Defra, “60% of England’s finest Grade 1 agricultural land is within areas at the highest risk of flooding from climate change”. Last year, winter floods and low crop yields caused a loss of £1.1 billion and a 19% fall in farming income.

The Dutch have repurposed a whole national park, De Biesbosch National Park, for storing floodwater, with Galloway cattle and horses lightly grazing the resurgent natural vegetation. In 2021 when neighbouring Belgium and Germany experienced extreme flooding, the park absorbed the floodwaters and the Netherlands avoided flooding.

Our wet uplands and peat bogs are valuable natural water and carbon stores – sphagnum moss can hold twenty times its own weight in water! This function is lost under the current land management

of drainage, sheep grazing and regular swaling or burning of vegetation that exposes and dries out the peaty soils.

Despite our uplands being much more valuable to us as water and carbon stores, their use for low-productivity sheep farming and shooting estates relies on public farming payments to exist. Starting with our upland national parks like Dartmoor, we could redirect that public money to restoring the uplands to hold back water.

We need to think radically in the face of climate change and worsening annual floods. The loss to our economy from ceasing farming on our uplands and floodplains would be more than offset by preventing the flooding of more economically productive and fertile lowlands and our communities, businesses and homes.