While some wildlife curls up to hibernate through winter, there are still a fair few active animals boldly foraging for food.

Unfortunately for some woodland creatures, this winter could be particularly hard. The record-breaking temperatures over the summer months triggered a ‘false autumn’ and put trees under immense stress, causing early fruiting of nuts and berries as they tried to pass their genes on to the next generation.

Jays are the most colourful members of the corvid family, with a chestnut brown body and brilliant blue wing patches. Although they eat invertebrates, beetles, nuts and fruits, they’re particularly famous for their connection with acorns, ‘caching’ them underground as a natural larder.

2020 was what’s known as a ‘mast year’ for oaks, where trees produce a bumper crop so animals and birds can’t possibly eat them all and more acorns germinate. This is particularly taxing so the following year they recover, yet this autumn the trees will be in recovery once again.

Climate change is to blame for these extreme weather events, and while heatwaves are out of our control, we’re looking to our wetlands to help with the impacts of flooding.

With rising sea levels, it may seem counterintuitive to create wetlands, but they can slow the flow, store water and last longer than the expensive man-made flood defences we rely upon – the structures that as a nation we can’t afford to maintain.

Our rivers are as disconnected from the floodplains as we’ve become from how they fluctuate seasonally, and there’s a need to reframe how we think about them.

For many of us, flooding understandably equals bad; but floodplains are an important part of a river. River channels are where water stays year-round, but floodplains must be available to allow water in periods of heavy rainfall to spread out.

Over the centuries we’ve cut rivers off from their floodplains, drained them for agricultural use, and built our houses and lives upon them, but they’re essential to preventing flooding elsewhere.

“Lots of the work we’re doing is to restore those natural processes and the connectivity. It’s key to supporting all the floodplain species we’re losing that are particularly vulnerable, and to reduce flood risks in other areas” says Anna Tarbet, GWT’s Ecosystem Recovery Manager.

“In flood events people want to feel safe, so we drain areas, dredge rivers and build better defences. It’s an understandable way to respond, but this won’t deal with the underlying issues. We tend to look to hard engineering first and nature-based solutions second. This, more often than not, is more expensive and not as long-lasting.”

“If we can build wetland restoration into a scheme like ELMS that compensates farmers to do so, we restore our floodplains and connectivity, which is better for wildlife and better for people too. It’s a win-win situation – we need to be less reactive and more proactive.”

Restoring out wetlands will also have carbon sequestration benefits. Blue carbon is the term for carbon captured by ocean and coastal ecosystems, while teal carbon is by land-based wetlands.

Carbon sequestration in freshwater habitats is much less well understood than peatlands and woodlands. GWT aims to broaden our understanding of how existing and newly created wetland habitats store carbon, with the goal of quantifying and providing evidence of carbon storage and biodiversity net gain.

“It’s a good direction to head in and will hopefully open up new avenues for funding - not just for us but for the people we work with and will also help to normalise nature-based solutions” says Anna.

By restoring natural processes now, we set ourselves up to be able to adapt to rising sea levels and the other impacts of climate change.

Nature is our most important ally in the fight against climate change, we need to unleash its full potential.