Natural Capital - Tweed Forum

Yeah no and I was hoping that we could do that just to to kick us off to give a kind of feel for the Tweed Forum was to look at the when I was researching the Tweed Forum one of the big kind of projects was the Edelson water project and I was wondering if we could talk about that it's quite a successful long-term study of natural flood management techniques can you tell us a bit about this project the the monitoring of this and maybe some of the kind of exciting findings?

Well, this is a project set up about 2010-ish, about that time, where a director and Professor Chris Spree from Dunn University were talking about trying to get together a sort of demonstration catchment to try and promote natural flood management.

Natural flood management is really just things like measures you can put in place to help slow the flow of water, like planting trees or native woodlands, restoring peatlands, putting in leaky barriers, like little beaver dams effectively.

Putting in water storage ponds, river restoration such as remiandering rivers, that kind of thing.

So there's a number of techniques that were well known actually for slowing the flow of water down into the towns that flood in the Borders.

And Peebles was one of them.

So the Edison Water Catchment is just at the top of Peebles, if you like.

Peebles is at the bottom of that catchment.

The water flows down quite fast into Peebles.

So it's quite handy.

It's quite close to Edinburgh.

So we thought it would be a good place to set up a demonstration catchment so we can get people out of the schools out and councillors out and politicians out to come and see this demonstration catchment.

So it was set up, as I say, about 12 years ago with this in mind, mostly government funded, with Dundee University doing the research on it.

And so all the work that was being done All the habitats are being restored and put in place.

They were to be monitored and to see the impact that these habitats were having.

So two or three key objectives.

One was to see what techniques would work of the ones I mentioned there.

What ones would be appealing to farmers? of the ones that we mentioned here.

It could make it cost effective, in fact, for farmers to do.

It could be tied in with the farm business so the farm business is not impacted.

And what multiple benefits could we actually create on the back of it, even though the driver was to try and slow the flow of water down into Peebles, for example.

Could we benefit other things like water quality, biodiversity, communities, engagement with the river, that kind of thing.

So it had these drivers in mind.

And I would say it's been pretty successful over that time frame.

The monitoring work is showing that these measures are slowing the flow down.