Upper Thames Catchment Partnership

Catchment partnership vision

Enhance a healthy and resilient water environment and provide wider benefits for people and nature at a catchment scale. Partner and farmer- led initiatives encourage and facilitate collaboration and synergy between partners, farmers, businesses and communities; helping all to achieve their goals. Key aims:

• identify water related issues and priority actions to ensure that work to improve the catchment is well informed by sound local evidence and data
• co-ordinate and integrate current and future plans to secure better and more effective outcomes - maximising the use of existing resources and seeking additional funding where appropriate
• share findings, best practice and communicate these widely with surrounding partnerships and community groups
• enhance public enjoyment and appreciation of watercourses and lakes
• put climate change at the heart of our decision making, promoting sustainable land management and moving toward regenerative agriculture and a natural processes approach. To have a template of groups of farmers working together along water bodies with communities to build resilience to climate change.

Related websites

Find out more about the activities and ambitions of this catchment partnership and how you can get involved to help improve the water environment in the catchment.

• Upper Thames Catchment Partnership webpage
• Catchment Management Plans on CaBA website

Partnership success highlights 2016 to 2021

The Upper Thames Catchment Partnership has facilitated more than 12 projects over the last 5 years. Several projects have involved multiple partners, demonstrating how partnership projects enhance the strength of individual organisations by ensuring the most appropriate partner leads on each work stream. Projects in the Upper Thames showcase the diverse type of work at the catchment scale that achieve multiple benefits:

• natural flood management (NFM)
• in-channel and riparian improvement works
• community and farmer engagement - ELMs trial moving towards setting up a farm led community interest company
• reducing urban and rural sources of pollution and assessing infrastructure of drainage and foul system networks.Cirencester and Fairford are part of the ‘Wild Towns’ and the ‘WILD Healthy Churn’ and ‘WILD Healthy Coln’ projects that have worked with local communities, volunteers and landowners to identify and ensure environmental improvements. These projects have increased the resilience of the towns to flooding, improved riparian habitat and identified issues with infrastructure causing flooding and water quality issues. Swindon is a focus for ‘Yellow Fish’ projects and improving floodplain connection and habitat along the River Ray. Other projects include the River Coln ‘Living Landscapes’, the Upper Coln and Landwise NFM projects, the Farmer Guardians of the Upper Thames facilitated farmer group and Environmental Land Management scheme trial, and Payments for Ecosystem Services projects to reduce pesticide use.

Partnership development plans

In 2022 we are exploring the setting up of a farmer-led community interest company to take high level investment of new infrastructure, repairing old infrastructure and making a business case for regenerative agriculture. We are also linking to the Local Nature and Enterprise Partnerships and the county council to deliver the Gloucestershire Food and Farming Partnership vision. A stakeholder analysis of the catchment partnership undertaken in 2019 highlighted that an area of focus going forward should be around engaging the local economy with the environment. Over the next 5 years we would like to demonstrate that the partnership is harnessing diverse funding from investors into rural and farming businesses, particularly where proposed projects will provide a clear benefit to climate resilience. Landscape Enterprise Networks (LENS) has been suggested as a framework for developing this workstream.