Mainstreaming nature-based solutions to deliver greater value

Mainstreaming nature-based solutions to deliver greater value

Amount awarded: £8,028,022

Led by: United Utilities

Partners: Affinity Water Limited, Anglian Water Service Limited, Arup, Dwr Cymru Cyfyngedig (Welsh Water), Jacobs UK Ltd., Mott MacDonald Ltd., North Star Transition, Northern Ireland Water Ltd., Northumbrian Water Limited, Ribble Rivers Trust, RSK Group (ADAS, Salix, WRc), SES Water Plc, Severn Trent Plc, South East Rivers Trust, South West Water Limited, Southern Water Services Limited, The Nature Conservancy, The Rivers Trust, United Utilities Water Limited, Water Resources South East, Westcountry Rivers Trust, Wildfowl and Wetland Trust

See the Mainstreaming Nature-based Solutions project website for more information.

Nature-based solutions have the potential to provide multiple socio-economic and environmental benefits by tackling flooding, drought and water quality issues at landscape scale. This transformational programme of work brings together multi-sectorial expertise and leadership to collaboratively create and test new solutions to remove these barriers through real-life case studies and facilitate and enable transition of nature-based solutions into business-as-usual to deliver greater value for customers, society, environment.

“Water companies want to use lower carbon and more environmentally-friendly solutions to serve our customers; the know-how is limited and solutions can be expensive for scale. This project will help us to lower the total cost of nature-based solutions, including customers in decision-making and help us all go greener faster.” – Kieran Brocklebank, Head of Innovation, United Utilities

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Update from the project (January 2025)

The MNbS programme is on track; we reached the first key milestone in September with the close out of the Initial Scoping and Review stage. This stage focused on extensive research and engagement to understand the current state of the NbS landscape across the regions and workstreams. The process deepened understanding of the barriers to mainstreaming NbS and informed refinement of the programme scope. Findings from this review are now available (see briefing notes attached).  We built essential collaborative relationships across programme partners, wider stakeholders, regulators, and Government. Collaboration has been actively driven (as with all UU-led Ofwat projects) through workshops and the roll out of a collaboration survey. Key insights from the first survey have been implemented to improve programme delivery, showing benefits in the second.  The project undertook a collaborative review of NbS in the PR24 Draft Determination, and provided recommendations for how NbS could be upscaled at Final Determination. We note the value of NbS in AMP8 increased from £2.2bn at DD to £3.3bn at FD.   We have now entered the next stage of the programme, focused on identifying barriers and enablers to NbS and setting up to test recommendations in Phase 2, which begins in October 2025. 

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Resources:

For more information on Mainstreaming nature-based solutions to deliver greater value, take a look at the following resources:

• The project was featured in the guest blog “Strength in difference – How the Ofwat Innovation Fund is supporting equity, diversity and inclusion” in October 2024
• Download the project’s briefing notes and register your interest in hearing more from the project here.
• Visit the project’s website for more information.
• This project was featured in the From Source to Sea Learning Report