Resilient landscapes: A reimagined approach
JBA’s Deputy Head of Environment and Sustainability, Matthew Hemsworth, and Climate Resilience Transformation Lead, Phil Emonson, explore a reimagined approach to managing resilient landscapes – one where shifting mosaics of water, life, and people move in complex patterns from source to sea.
How do we manage river corridors, catchments, and landscapes to shape a resilient future for all?
Over the last two decades, communities across the UK have experienced turbulent climatic conditions. Temperature extremes, an increased frequency and intensity of storms leading to flooding, and longer, drier periods leading to droughts. Alongside the enormous financial implications and disruption for healthcare, transport, utilities, and education services, these events have put untold mental health pressures on individuals, families, and communities.
Our landscape—the ground beneath us and the ecosystems it supports, the land we farm, live on, rely on, and enjoy—has also borne the brunt. And as our climate changes, we know that in future there will be more weather events that will bring such disruption for people, places and landscapes.
The case for change
We are at a turning point in how we manage our landscape. The science now makes clear that resilience is not only about withstanding shocks but about enabling entire landscapes—and the communities and habitats that depend on them—to adapt, recover, and continue to thrive. The case for change is clear, and the policy, strategy, funding, and decision-making landscape is changing.
From containment to connectivity
A central challenge is rethinking the landscape as a complex, interconnected system. Beyond a patchwork of fields, rivers, or towns, we need to understand an evolving “riverscape” where water, energy, nutrients, organisms, and people flow in dynamic patterns between land and water. Traditionally, management has focused on containing rivers - protecting property by keeping water in its channel. But we are learning that confining rivers reduces their ability to support rich floodplain habitats, increases the speed and severity of floods, degrades water quality, and undermines biodiversity and carbon storage.
At the national level, in Autumn 2024, the UK Government announced the establishment of a Floods Resilience Taskforce "to turbocharge the development of flood defences and bolster the nation’s resilience to extreme weather." This is a positive step toward future investment. Yet true resilience may come from moving beyond a focus on just defending, towards instead restoring and reconnecting natural processes across the whole landscape.
The last decade has seen a widening of interventions: nature-based solutions seek to “rebalance connectivity”—restoring the natural movement of water, sediment, nutrients, and living things between rivers and their adjacent landscapes. This includes rewilding floodplains, recreating wetlands, removing artificial barriers, and using natural materials like wood to slow the flow and increase habitat complexity. Such approaches work with, not against, the inherent dynamism of our landscapes. Delivering benefits for flood risk management, habitat diversity, water quality, and climate buffering.
Resilience as a shared endeavour
Nevertheless, investments often remain siloed, dominated by risk management and project-by-project funding, and limited by asset-focused rather than system-focused thinking. More often weighed by the needs of the present generation without enough regard for the future or the interconnectedness of rural and urban areas.
We must ask: Do our current arrangements truly create resilient landscapes? Or is there a more ambitious, sustainable model that generates greater value for the public purse, places, and people?
Bouncing forward
Achieving this vision requires seeing resilience not just as “bouncing back,” but as “bouncing forward”—pursuing prosperity, equality, inclusion, and climate justice. It demands we measure success by enhanced ecosystem services, community well-being, and sustained capacity to adapt and thrive. It means society must become better aware of risks, better able to adapt, respond, and recover, and more engaged in shaping the future of the places we share.
The UK Government’s National Resilience Framework establishes that “resilience should be a whole-society endeavour.”
Delivering on that promise involves recognising that connectivity is more than an ecological concept—it is social, cultural, and economic. Reconnecting our landscapes means integrating the knowledge and goals of communities, practitioners, scientists, and policymakers alike. It means overcoming siloed disciplines and fragmented governance. And it means measuring what matters—tracking not just flood defences, but the full set of benefits that arise from a resilient, diverse, and well-connected landscape.
Resilient landscapes for the next generation
Fundamentally, we need a reimagining of how we manage our river corridors, catchments, and wider landscapes—not as separate entities, but as shifting mosaics, where water, life, and people move in complex patterns, from source to sea and laterally across the land. By placing social value and inclusivity at the heart of investment and planning, and by working with the dynamism of nature, we can create landscapes that are not just resilient - but regenerative and rich for generations to come.
Contact Phil Emonson or Matthew Hemsworth.
