Responses to date on the Vision

The vision needs to explicitly include the fact that people earn their living from the land – especially through farming.

Residents and communities may need support to adapt to more space being needed for nature. Similar to farmers, and especially in critical locations.

Smaller fields will be a big challenge to achieve lower down the catchment and aren’t the only solution to a more wildlife-rich landscape but key part of it.

Concern that the images don’t reflect the large amount of development planned in the catchment.  To be credible the vision needs to acknowledge it, to be realistic.

Like to see some more emphasis on disabled access

Link to Exe Estuary

Include other possible architectural responses – eg houses on stilts!

Scale of flood relief offered by nature-based solutions needs to be seen in context with planned development.

New development is a challenge but also brings funding opportunities

Concern about the benefits or challenges of beavers in the landscape

Important to bring farmers into it as they own and anglers need to know more about it.

Could add something about mitigating flood risk/drought risk

Suggest adding an objective to protect and improve summer low flows. Many actions proposed are holding back rainfall in soil and landscape which will make low flows more resilient with lower summer rainfall. Also, farmers may need to store the winter rainfall in the landscape so that they can abstract it in the summer instead of relying on the river flow. So, this protects the summer low flows too. Maybe the potential use of the water stored in the landscape during the summer for abstraction could be mentioned on the images?

I would like to see something about routes for people, for walking and cycling. This would help with adaptation to climate change – and mitigation too, albeit in a very small way.

I realise vision statements by their nature are “woolly” but it doesn’t seem to actually say anything with any clarity. For example there is no mention of flood risk unless this is wrapped up in “space to flow…safely” . What do you actually mean by “protecting and enhancing”? If the vision is better defined then people might have a clearer idea of what needs to be done to get there.

I am an ecologist and a fly fisher and having spent much time observing beavers in Canada and Poland I am assured that beaver reintroduction is imperative

Too many strategies are too vague in their recommendations to be useful. I hope that the vision has a list of prioritised projects of various sizes and types that can be progressed by the relevant organisations / community groups who can use the data and evidence from the Connecting the Culm project to assist with gaining grants and other funding to progress different aspects. It would be such a shame for all this work to just sit on a shelf due to a lack of clarity on the way forwards. The approach used by the Somerset Rivers Authority to split a high level action plan into “workstreams” delivered by a variety of methods ( eg direct implementation by delivery partners, grants to individual landowners etc) and funding streams might be worth considering.

My children would like places to play closer to the river

It’d be great if southwest water would let the angling groups contribute to decision making

I am not sure I know what the shared vision is from what has been presented

At the moment it comes across as a bit woolly and vague – its easy to support

They are very pretty pictures but I don’t get the link between what they show, how this differs from what there is now and how this links to the vision

That is how we want it to be. That is how it was when I was child. I never expected it to be any different. I remember as a child picking primroses by the river. Farming was so different when I was young.