Communities across Norfolk and Suffolk are being urged to put forward project ideas to build up their resilience to flooding - while saving water at the same time.
The call comes as part of a new joint initiative by the two counties’ councils to ‘Reclaim the Rain’ - after an award of £6.4m was made by the government's six-year Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation Programme.
The cross-county project was chosen as one of 25 successful schemes across the UK by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
Six communities - three in each county - will be chosen as part of the project’s initial stage, with the results fed back to DEFRA.
Tom Mann, a senior project manager for the scheme at Suffolk County Council, said the region had a tendency to be overlooked by Whitehall, because the method it uses to allocate funding to address flooding often prioritises urban areas over rural ones.
He said DEFRA's programme was aimed at redressing this imbalance.
“Norfolk and Suffolk is by far and away the driest part of the UK, and very often we have water scarcity issues as well,” said Mr Mann, who added that the region’s low levels of rainfall was comparable to that of Greece, Egypt or Spain.
Despite this overall annual dryness, communities across the two counties - many of them rural - remain vulnerable to floods.
He said: “We’re keeping the brief quite open, and it could be anything from small-scale domestic things like water butts or rain gardens or ditches - the much more small, localised features that can make a difference when they’re scaled up and you have a lot of them.
“Or we’re also looking at other examples of floodwater storage basins. Let’s say for example, we had a farm or somebody that needed water for irrigation - well, if we could find a suitable catchment, we could take that excess floodwater, stick it in the farmer’s irrigation basin and have him use that to water his crops.
“Suddenly, it becomes obvious that the benefits to this are not just preventing flooding, but actually providing a resource out of that water.”
Parish councils, community groups, and even groups of landowners, are welcome to express an interest in applying to be one of the six selected areas - by visiting: https://www.reclaimtherain.org/contact-us
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