Client: Westcountry Rivers Trust (WRT)
Year: 2023
eftec team: Allan Provins, Natalya Kharadi, Claudio Contento
Links: Full Report, Water for Growth project page, WRT's 2023 Impact Report
About the Water for Growth Project
Cornish rivers have been degrading over time. Habitat loss for migratory fish species, such as salmon and trout, has been driven by a mixture of human pressures and the presence of historic weirs, which act as physical barriers to migratory fish species and reduce their populations in the area.
The Westcountry Rivers Trust (WRT) recognised that without intervention, this continued degradation would negatively impact local communities, ecology, and business activity in Cornwall.
To help address this, WRT launched the Water for Growth (W4G) project in 2017 to:
Restore aquatic natural assets;
Support sustainable economic growth of businesses, and
Modernise and develop angling payment for ecosystem services (PES) market mechanisms.
Working in partnership with landowners, angling clubs, and regional and national agencies, the W4G project designed and implemented interventions to improve the rivers Camel and Fowey over 2017 – 2022 using funding of £2.5 million from the European Regional Development Fund.
In total, 17 barriers to fish passage were removed or redesigned and four hectares of habitat enhanced over the life of the project. In addition, the Fish Pass App was developed to support access to angling while simplifying payment processes from anglers.
Assessing the economic costs and benefits
After the W4G project was completed, WRT commissioned eftec to carry out an Independent Economic Assessment (IEA) of the intended impacts and outcomes of the W4G project to determine the value for money of the project.
We evaluated the programme against the following questions:
What has been achieved?
How has this been achieved?
What is the value for money of the W4G Project?
For this IEA to truly reflect the value of the project, we integrated a natural capital approach within the economic assessment to ensure that economic, ecological, and social benefits were captured. Traditional economic assessments would not include all these, thus underestimating the benefits.
Our Findings
We found that a large extent of the increased natural capital value in the River Fowey and Camel catchments are due to improved fish passage and enhanced river habitats. These, in turn, improve the ability of salmon and trout to move upstream to reach their spawning grounds and increase their populations, sustaining local economic activity (angling) and benefitting the wider ecosystem.
We also found that the W4G project was expected to achieve its targeted outputs and be within budget as it closed. Through assessment of the costs against the benefits, including improvements in natural capital, we found that every £1 spent on the W4G project produced a benefit of £7.70.
Key recommendations
The W4G project is an excellent example of how investing in natural capital can return major benefits to local economies, and ecosystems. We found that success in this project was driven by the coordination between WRT and the project steering group, active engagement with local stakeholders throughout the project cycle, and effective project management by WRT.
A key to better evaluation is to start collecting data at the start of a project like this both for the baseline and for monitoring the outputs and outcomes from the project.
A short video was created to celebrate the W4G project, which you can watch here