As I walk across the newly pedestrianised Hammersmith bridge, London is as it should be—grey and rainy. Ordinarily, getting drenched on the way to an interview might be annoying. But today it couldn’t be more apt, because I’m on my way to the London Wetland Centre. And as the driest spring in 69 years finally breaks, the question at hand is this: how do we hold onto the rain when it falls, to avert the droughts to come?
I meet Kevin Peberdy, the deputy chief executive of the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT), at the visitor centre. It happens to be the 25th anniversary of the London Wetlands, which Peberdy was instrumental in designing at the site of four decommissioned Victorian clay-lined reservoirs. WWT teamed up with housing developer Berkeley Homes in 1995 to return it to nature (plus a side-serving of lucrative new Berkeley Homes) via five years of earth moving and planting. When it opened in 2000, a young and ambitious Peberdy thought it would be the first of many such large urban wetlands.
Initially he was right. Peberdy was personally invited to help design the Hong Kong Wetland Park, which opened in 2006. Back home, however, the momentum stalled. Now in 2025, an older and wiser Peberdy laments that “these opportunities are not common. So you've got to downscale your aspirations, and that's what we're doing now with housing developers: how do you build these blue spaces into developments on a smaller scale, at house level, at street level?”
With binoculars hanging around his neck as we walk, Peberdy calls Labour’s target of 1.5 million new homes this parliament “a big opportunity as well as a big threat” —by threat he is referring to the removal of environmental protections in new planning laws. “But the big opportunity is that these new developments could have blue infrastructure [ie watery bits, like ponds or wetlands] within them, because rain is a problem falling on hard ground. You know, the changing weather patterns mean a lot more intense rainfall.” (Yes, I do know—see my previous column).
“The Environment Agency say that one of their biggest headaches is now flash flooding from heavy rainfall,” Peberdy continues. “So how do you deal with that at a local level?”
More wetlands is how. But while we walk around this 40-hectare (100-acre) rewilded site, what we’re really talking about is many micro, less than one acre (roughly half a football pitch) wetlands built into our villages, towns and cities. These are known by the rather unattractive acronym SuDS, or sustainable urban drainage systems. In China, where this has been part of national planning since 2015, they are known rather more catchily as “sponge cities”. In short, creating micro wetlands entails replacing asphalt with greenery wherever possible to absorb torrential rain, reduce flooding and refill aquifers. Blue infrastructure has a hierarchy. Fully restored wetlands with native species, returning migratory birds and ideally a beaver or two are at the top of the pyramid; at the base are myriad parks, trees, ponds, swales and ditches.
With 370,000 homes to be built in England every year for the next five years, SuDS will be essential if these new towns are to be climate resilient—and the water company reservoirs full enough to supply them. Already, 6.3 million UK properties are at risk of flooding; and with extended periods of extreme rainfall now seven times more likely than pre-industrial times, by the 2050s it is estimated that coastal and river flooding in England and Wales could lead to £6.8bn in economic losses.
This danger was foreseen by Schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, which made SuDS a legal requirement for most new developments. However, amid the coalition government’s fanatical flurry of red tape removal, Schedule 3 was shelved. It remains unimplemented.
Even where SuDS are installed by more progressive developers, they tend to be what Peberdy describes as “bomb craters”—picture an empty swimming pool lined with grass, and two concrete inflow channels. “The vast majority of ‘wetland’ SuDS are these bomb craters at the edge of housing developments: a 45 degree slope down to a flat bed. When it rains, that will half fill up with water, and 24-48 hours later, it will be empty,” he says. This is much better than nothing, but Peberdy explains that, with a bit of planning and planting, they could be mini versions of the London Wetlands, fighting Britain’s biodiversity and climate crises at the same time. Then he reaches for his binoculars, spying a nearby snipe.
Peberdy hasn’t entirely given up on grand plans, though. Wetlands—and salt marshes in particular— potentially have a huge role to play in protecting Britain’s extensive coastline from erosion and sea level rises. He describes salt marshes as unique climate resilience “weapons”. They create a natural barrier to rising sea levels, while also storing carbon as vegetation is slowly buried under sequential layers of sand and silt and new vegetation forms. Picture that geography-lesson image of how coal formed millions of years ago, but in fast forward. WWT is currently trying to work with the carbon credit market to recognise the carbon storage potential of salt marshes. Its research shows they capture carbon 40 times faster than forests.
WWT recently purchased 148-hectares of low-lying coastal land on the Awre peninsula, Gloucestershire, for salt-marsh restoration. Significantly larger than even the London Wetlands, it was made possible by a £21m donation from the insurance company Aviva. In theory, the money invested in resilience could be less than that paid out in insurance claims from flooding. That the private sector is moving faster on this issue than the Environment Agency or Defra raises awkward questions for us all.
WWT is now calling for the creation of 100,000 hectares of new and restored wetlands in the UK by 2050, equivalent to just 0.6 per cent of the UK’s farmland. This is modest compared to the mapped potential, according to the organisation, for 673,000 hectares of “wetlands for water quality”, 174,100 hectares of “wetlands for carbon storage” (salt marshes), 587,600 hectares of “wetlands for flood resilience” and 196,500 hectares of “wetlands for urban wellbeing”. And it’s a tiny sliver compared to the approximately 8 million hectares of wetland lost to modern drainage in the UK since 1700. The UK’s climate resilience relies to a very great extent on wetland restoration. We don’t need to drain the swamp—we need to fill it.
