Catchment Management Plans
At a strategic level, it is sometimes necessary to consider an entire catchment and to devise a strategy to manage the water resources, the river ecology, the proposed development and the flooding — including strategic flood risk assessments and water cycle strategies.
A whole-catchment approach
Our engineers and scientists have a wide range of experience in all aspects of hydrological management, and often work with specialist ecologists and hydrogeologists to provide a complete specialist team.
Working at catchment scale lets the competing demands on a river system — water resources, ecology, development growth and flood risk — be balanced in a single strategy rather than resolved piecemeal, site by site.
What a catchment plan can cover
- Strategic Flood Risk Assessments — catchment-wide flood risk evidence to inform local plans and allocations
- Water cycle strategies — balancing water supply, wastewater and flood risk against planned growth
- Water resources and ecology — assessing the resource and the river ecology that development must work within
- Drainage board and watercourse management — supporting Internal Drainage Boards and local authorities with the management of ordinary watercourses
How we work
- Catchment characterisation — we build the picture of the catchment's hydrology, water resources, ecology and flood risk from available data.
- Issues and objectives — we work with the drainage board, authority or landowners to set the objectives the strategy needs to deliver.
- Strategy development — we develop and test management options, assembling ecologists and hydrogeologists into the team where specialist input is needed.
- Plan and recommendations — we set out a deliverable catchment management plan with prioritised, costed interventions.
Why Water Environment?
Catchment management is hydrological management at scale — our core ground. We bring the hydrology, flood risk and drainage engineering together and add specialist ecologists and hydrogeologists to form a complete team, so the strategy is technically deliverable rather than aspirational. We work for drainage boards, local authorities and landowners across all of England and Wales.
We are members of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM) and hold professional qualifications with the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE).
Related Projects
Canterbury City Council NMS
Nutrient Neutrality · Catchment Management
Water Environment provided specialist consultancy services for this project.