How beavers could become key to preventing droughts

Conservationists are championing river restoration and the reintroduction of beavers as crucial strategies to build landscape resilience against the escalating risk of drought. With two northern regions already in drought thanks to the UK’s driest spring in 132 years, the South West of England offers a compelling case study.

- Emily Beament, The Independent

Despite receiving only half its average spring rainfall, the National Trust’s Holnicote estate on Exmoor, Somerset, has maintained lush vegetation and thriving wetlands thanks to extensive river restoration work. The estate's ‘Riverlands’ project, launched in 2020, released beavers into two enclosures and worked to restore the River Aller to a ‘stage zero’ state — its natural, multi-channelled form with pools and shallow riffles, as it would have been before human interference. This approach, pioneered in Oregon, US, involved diggers moving over 4,000 tonnes of earth and laying hundreds of logs within the floodplain, marking the UK's first attempt at scale on a main river.