Environment Agency: Using local investigations to improve catchment resilience

Tender description

The Environment Agency wants to ensure that catchments in England are resilient to a range of pressures, both now and in the future. The Environment Agency is currently exploring how it can use resilience in a practical way and understand how we define and measure catchment resilience. Resilience might be an inherent property of or an aspiration for a catchment and might be measured by a catchments ability to recover or bounce back from a disturbance. Resilience maybe framed according to the function(s) of the catchment or elimination (reduction) of problems. Pathways to resilience may include avoiding a disturbance, increasing resistance to a disturbance or enhancing recovery to the disturbance. It may be explored using single or multi-metric approaches or an assessment of the drivers of problems. There are no well-defined measures of catchment resilience and this project is intended as a trial to understand how different properties of catchments make them more or less resilient to the prevailing pressures and the expected future pressures. The results are expected to identify transferable knowledge to improve resilience elsewhere and also to understand if this kind of approach is helpful for catchment managers. This project is one of a number of studies exploring different aspects of resilience. The specific focus of this project is to explore the potential for identifying opportunities to increase resilience locally through investigations designed to elucidate the pressure-response relationship in catchments with real-world problems.