Severn Trent – Cash for Catchments: The Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) partnerships were brought in by Defra in 2011 to help achieve the Water Framework Directive initiatives. These partnerships bring together a wide range of local organisations (including NGOs, water companies, local authorities, landowners, angling clubs, farming groups, academia, and local businesses) to promote collaborative working at a river catchment scale to realise environmental, social, and economic benefits.

CaBA partnerships aim to drive cost-effective delivery on the ground; resulting in multiple benefits including improvements to water quality, enhanced biodiversity, reduced flood risk, resilience to climate change, and greater community engagement with their local river. Stakeholder engagement is essential for the implementation of a catchment management strategy and we see the CaBA partnerships as key in aiding the delivery of our strategy. Over 36,000 people nationwide are engaged with CaBA partnerships, forming over 100 CaBA partnerships across England and Wales – 14 of which sit in the Severn Trent region.

The core of each partnership in the made up of a host, Environment Agency Catchment Coordinator, and representatives from local River and Wildlife Trusts. The majority of the CaBA partnerships in our region are hosted by the local River or Wildlife Trusts. However, Severn Trent have the responsibility of sole hosting the Tame, Anker and Mease (TAM) CaBA group, this makes us one of the only water companies to sole host a CaBA partnership. To find out more about the CaBA partnerships visit the official CaBA website .

Cash for Catchments

This year, Severn Trent is launching an exciting new scheme called Cash for Catchments, which aims to deliver funding to support a range of important causes, including:

• Preservation of our region’s biodiversity
• Control of invasive non-native species
• Natural flood management
• River restoration
• Improving river water quality 

How Cash for Catchments works

We’ll be inviting people from across the region to submit project ideas for ways to have a positive impact on these water environment challenges. We hope the best of these projects will be real game changers and make a massive positive difference to our region. The best projects will be shortlisted and the successful applicants will be invited to present their project to a panel Dragons’ Den style!   Click here to access more details