Stripping nature

As a flood-stricken UK battles nature’s forces, with thousands of homes under water and flood warnings still mounting, two questions stand out: could we have prepared for these natural disasters and will we prepare for the next?

Water-related hazards, including droughts and floods, account for 90% of all natural hazards, and their frequency and intensity are generally rising. In 2010 alone, some 373 natural disasters killed more than 296,800 people, affected nearly 208 million others and cost nearly US $110 billion.

The UK is experiencing its fair share of flooding at the moment, blaming everything and everybody for the situation without getting to the real root cause of it. I think we are to blame: the farmers, the urbanites, the road and rail users, the policy makers – because we simply do not know what we are doing to the natural order of things.

You see, nature has a way of dealing with high rainfall events and storms. Rich, dense vegetation in a landscape can dull the impact of a downpour, diluting, absorbing, channelling, holding and then slowly releasing water. Mangroves and salt marshes buffer coastal landscapes from storms, reducing the force of the onslaught by softening its power and slowing the erosive energy of wind and wave action. Unlike eroded, heavily utilised or human-altered environments, these systems are designed by nature to take on nature.

If ecosystems are well-managed, we can use them as natural water infrastructure to achieve the same objectives as hard engineered infrastructure including dams, pipelines, water treatment plants, irrigation systems, drainage networks and flood management embankments.

For example, wetlands can store and clean water, reduce flood risks and allocate water to a wide range of users, from mountains to the sea. Healthy soil biodiversity can ensure water availability for crops and increase food security, while reducing agricultural water use. We have the ability to protect coastal communities from storms by strengthening coastal ecosystems as buffers and to address desertification by restoring land cover and soils to keep water in the ground.

We live in an increasingly water-insecure world. Currently 884 million people are living without safe drinking water and 2.5 billion people do not have adequate sanitation. By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could be under water stress conditions. Under current trends, future demands on water to feed growing human populations, to supply intensive production of goods and to support growing economies will not be met.

Biodiversity underpins our water future. We need to protect natural systems because they provide the life force on which we depend. Fauna & Flora International is helping companies like Anglo American integrate ecosystem scale water management to ensure the sustainability of water available to them and the communities they operate with and within.

Read more about the partnership between Anglo American and Fauna & Flora International here.