Rebel Restoration – Community-led nature restoration and flood resilience

In this IIL nature and sustainability webinar, Richard Woodfine provides an introduction to Rebel Restoration and how funding community-led nature recovery can help protect people and places from flooding.

This talk introduces Rebel Restoration, a UK charity that funds and supports community-led nature restoration to reduce climate risk, restore ecosystems and strengthen local resilience. Using Ilkley Moor in the South Pennines as a detailed case study, it will show how restoring degraded peatland through natural flood management – including gully blocking, leaky dams, sphagnum planting and hydrological monitoring – can slow and store water upstream, reducing downstream flood risk for communities and assets.

This session explains why healthy upland landscapes function as natural infrastructure and why investing in restoration upstream is one of the few ways to reduce flood risk before damage occurs. It will also place this work in the context of Rebel Restoration’s wider portfolio, which includes projects in forests, chalk streams and grasslands, near-shore marine and coastal habitats, regenerative agriculture, and community initiatives that connect people with nature. This talk will close with an invitation to support scaling this practical, evidence-led approach to climate and nature resilience.

Learning objectives

• Understand how nature-based solutions, particularly upland peatland restoration, can reduce flood risk by slowing and storing water upstream, using Ilkley Moor as a practical case study
• Recognise the role of community-led nature restoration as preventative infrastructure, and how it can complement traditional flood defences in managing physical climate risk
• Explore how charities like Rebel Restoration deliver, monitor and scale nature-based interventions across multiple habitats – including peatlands, forests, freshwater and coastal systems – to generate measurable resilience benefits

Speaker(s)

Chair: William Butler, CEO & Founder, GaiaSicura Ltd