Natural Flood Risk Management Strategies

Natural flood risk management strategies harness landscape features and ecological processes to reduce flood peaks, slow runoff and increase water retention. Interventions range from woodland creation and wetland restoration to leaky dams and floodplain reconnection. By retaining water in soils, intercepting rainfall and attenuating flows, these measures complement conventional engineered defences and often deliver co-benefits for biodiversity, water quality and recreation. Implementation requires an understanding of catchment hydrology, local land-use pressures and stakeholder priorities. Spatial planning and hydrological modelling guide the placement of interventions to maximise effectiveness while avoiding unintended consequences such as reduced groundwater recharge or downstream displacement of flood risk. Effective schemes are tailored to site conditions, climate variability and community needs, with multi-actor governance ensuring maintenance and adaptive management. Globally, natural approaches are gaining traction as climate change intensifies flood hazards and public demand grows for sustainable, multifunctional infrastructure.

Research from Nature Portfolio

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Natural Flood Risk Management Strategies publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in natural flood risk management strategies across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Natural Flood Management (NFM): use of natural processes in catchments—such as woodland, wetlands and leaky dams—to slow and store water, reducing flood peaks.

Nature-based Solutions (NBS): strategies that employ ecosystem functions to address challenges like flood risk while delivering benefits for biodiversity and water quality.

Catchment: the area of land drained by a river and its tributaries, within which hydrological responses are influenced by land cover and topography.

Runoff Attenuation Features (RAFs): small-scale structures (e.g. bunds, ponds, swales) designed to slow surface water flow and promote infiltration.

Hydrograph: a graph showing how river discharge varies over time following a rainfall event, used to assess flood peak magnitude and timing.

References

1. A critical review of Natural Flood Management application and spatial prioritisation approaches in tropical island catchments. The Science of The Total Environment (2023).
2. Multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary approaches to nature-based flood risk management. Current Opinion in Environmental Science & Health (2024).
3. Time variable effectiveness and cost-benefits of different nature-based solution types and design for drought and flood management. Nature-Based Solutions (2023).