F&B Talk - Making Room for Rivers

Tom Kay, Forest & Bird's Fresh Water Advocate will be talking about the ‘Making Room for Rivers’ campaign. Allowing rivers to move rather than engineering them into artificial channels is a nature-friendly way to reduce flooding.
Working with nature to avoid disasters – how ‘making room for rivers’ and other nature-based solutions can help us out of the problems we’ve engineered

Recent extreme weather, including Cyclone Gabrielle, has highlighted the vulnerability of our communities to flooding and brought into question our approach to river management and flood protection. It has also started conversations across the country about ‘sponge cities’, ‘making room for rivers’, and other ‘nature-based solutions’ to the impacts of climate change. In this talk, Tom will show us how the way we have managed our environment has exacerbated flooding and disaster risk, particularly discussing the impact of flood protection engineering on the health of our rivers. He’ll discuss how this is made worse by the loss of wetlands and forests, and outline a ‘new’ way of thinking about building resilience to climate change in our communities.