Collaborative Catchments
“How might we create a new era of integrated catchment management by equipping partnerships with the shared insights, digital tools, and intelligence needed to deliver 10x the impact for environmental benefit?”
Partnerships across the UK are already delivering meaningful environmental improvements. The “Catchment based approach” (CaBA) has brought together local knowledge, trusted relationships, and a shared commitment to the environment, forming the foundation for effective, place-based action. We now expect Catchment Partnerships to play a key role in influencing decision-making through regional water systems planning. This sprint aims to understand the ability of partnerships to meet this challenge, and provide a route map for accessing the insights, platforms and tools which will be key enablers.
Despite the current strengths of CaBA, a gap remains between the data we collect and the action we take. Fragmented monitoring and a persistent “data gap” mean that stakeholders often lack a consistent, trusted evidence base for decision-making. The Cunliffe Review and the Government’s Water White Paper highlight the need for a more integrated approach to water planning and investment, supported by increased data transparency and digital tools and use of citizen science data. This shift is now driving the move towards regional water systems planning, bringing together integrated catchment planning and catchment partnerships, infrastructure planning, and wider environmental investment into a more joined-up framework.
Initiatives like Stream and River Deep Mountain AI (RDMAI) provide an opportunity to support this shift.
By equipping partnerships with the right data and tools we can improve shared understanding, build trust across stakeholders, and support more coordinated, system-level decision-making.
Our sprint is an opportunity to bring catchment partnerships and data to the forefront of regional water planning, ensuring catchment level data and insight inform regional plans, and shaping the governance models and digital tools that will drive better decisions and stronger environmental action across the Northeast and beyond.
This sprint will focus on how we move from evidence to action in integrated catchment planning and management, by strengthening the connection between data, people, investment, and decision-making at the regional scale.
Across the sprint, we will explore three core elements of integrated catchment planning and regional water systems:
- Policy, planning, and legislation – how local and catchment action aligns with regional and national priorities
- People and partnerships – how stakeholders collaborate, build trust, and make decisions
- Data and digital systems – how we collect, access, and use evidence and tools to drive action
Participants will:
- Define what high-impact integrated partnerships look like at both catchment and regional level
- Design practical integrated partnership models and ways of working that connect data → insight → action → impact
- Share how learning, data-sharing frameworks and open-source digital models, from initiatives like Stream, RDMAI, MNBS and CaSTCo, can be applied to gain actionable insights to strengthen local and regional decision making.
- Explore how partnerships can design, use and adopt open-source digital tools to understand the issues and opportunities, and prioritise integrated actions
- Identify how successful integrated approaches can be scaled and shared across catchments and regions
- Explore how integrated catchment-level insight and action can be translated into regional planning and investment decisions
Discover – Understanding the system
- Exploring how integrated catchment planning and catchment partnerships operate today, and what the ambitions are for change
- Identifying stakeholder needs, barriers to effective collaboration and decision-making, and pain points
- Examining where data, trust, and coordination gaps exist
Define – Focusing the challenge
- Identify the key partnership activities and processes which could be made more impactful or efficient
- Defining problem statements and agreeing the right problems to solve together through partnerships
- Explore how alternative models and digital tools could be used to help realise ambitions and change
Develop – Designing solutions
- Defining partnership identity and shared purpose, governance, and evidence sharing arrangements
- Mutual value mapping to understand and explore how catchment partnership ways of working and decision-making processes can play an effective role in regional water systems planning
- Workshop potential digital improvements – “What could we build that would make our work more effective?”
Deliver – Shaping implementation
- Identify the actions needed to influence decisions and implement solutions, ensuring alignment to policy and partnership needs and how to document their impact
- Plan a roadmap for access to and adoption of trusted freely available digital tools
- Outlining pathways to scaling up integrated approaches from catchments to regions and across the wider sector
By the end of the sprint, we aim to deliver:
Northeast partnership model for regional systems planning
A practical, adaptable approach that connects integrated catchment-level insights to regional water planning, supporting long-term collaboration across regions.
Stronger, more connected partnerships
Working more effectively within and across regions, with clearer roles, shared understanding, and improved collaboration.
Clarity on decision and information flows needed for catchment management
Build shared understanding of who needs to make decisions and what information is needed to inform them to improve prioritisation of monitoring, investment, and action to deliver greater environmental impact.
Better use of data driven tools to drive action
Unlocking access to data and digital tools to enable faster, more effective decision-making from catchment to regional scale.
A pathway to implementation
Defined next steps for equipping local and regional partnerships with data-sharing frameworks and open-source digital models, including a roadmap for adoption across the sector.
- Catchment partnerships and environmental teams, with insights and stronger tools to plan, influence, and coordinate actions
- Water companies and regulators, using shared digital and data insights to prioritise interventions and investments (for 2030-35 PR29/AMP9)
- Regional planning authorities, partnership models that drive better investment decisions and outcomes
- Landowners, eNGOs, and local environmental stakeholders, understand their role and value in the catchment-based approach (CaBA) and are empowered to work in partnership to influence decision making and drive environmental action
- Innovation and data teams, exploring how digital and data models, such as those created through the Ofwat funded River Deep Mountain AI project, can be adopted to deliver real-world impact
- Rivers and ecosystems, benefiting from faster, more coordinated planning and improvements