Cross-border collaboration in action — improving river ecosystems, enhancing water quality monitoring and supporting communities to protect and restore shared catchments for the long term.

Catchment Action for Local Management

Nature-Based Solutions

Working with nature to improve water quality, restore habitats and build more resilient catchments.

Working With Nature To Protect Our Water

Clean water sustains our health, our landscapes and our shared future. Yet rivers and catchments across the border region face mounting pressure from nutrient pollution, sediment and changing land use. At CALM, we believe the most effective and lasting answers come from working with nature rather than against it.

What Are Nature-Based Solutions?

Nature-based solutions are practical actions that protect, restore and sustainably manage natural ecosystems to improve water quality, while delivering wider benefits for people, wildlife and climate resilience.

Instead of relying only on engineered infrastructure, they use plants, soils, wetlands and landscapes to filter pollutants, slow runoff and restore healthy water cycles. They’re cost-effective, adaptable, and their benefits last for generations.

Proven: measurable improvements in water quality, even in extreme weather

Good value: lower long-term costs than hard infrastructure, with returns for fisheries, tourism and farming

Multiple benefits at once: water quality, flood risk, biodiversity and carbon storage

Community-driven: green spaces everyone can enjoy, from rural farms to towns

The Problems We're Tackling

Across the CALM catchments, the main threats to our rivers are consistent: nutrient run-off from fertiliser and slurry on nearby fields; poaching of riverbanks where livestock reach the water to drink; siltation of the riverbed from bank erosion and lost riparian habitat; and invasive species such as Himalayan Balsam, Japanese Knotweed and Giant Hogweed.

Macroinvertebrate monitoring as part of Nature Based Solutions data collection
Each of our Nature Based Solutions are implemented following scientifically robust data collection of Macroinvertebrates, Habitat Quality, Fisheries Data and Water quality to ensure the right measure is in the right place.
Livestock accessing a stream for drinking water
A typical example of a location where livestock access the stream for drinking water.
Eroded river bank caused by cattle poaching
Examples of an eroded river bank caused by cattle poaching.
River bank erosion and silt build-up
Erosion of the river bank causing a build-up of silt, which will damage habitats downstream.
Creation of a riparian protection strip
Creating riparian buffer strips.

Fencing sections of riverbank and planting native trees and shrubs creates protected riparian buffer strips. The vegetation helps stabilise riverbanks through its root structure, while fencing prevents livestock from accessing the watercourse, reducing bank erosion and siltation in local waterways.

Trees and shrubs planted along a river bank
Planting native trees and shrubs along river banks helps stabilise the banks, reduce nutrient run-off from adjacent fields, and create refugia for instream fauna.
Rubble installed to create a more natural river habitat
Reintroducing a more natural river habitat.

Over previous decades, many rivers and streams have been straightened and deepened to move flood water more quickly downstream. Turning streams into canals causes enormous damage to river habitats. ABC Council has installed large rubble stone to reintroduce a more natural river habitat.

Diagram showing the structure of a SMART Buffer Strip
Developing a SMART Buffer.

ABC Council has identified a number of locations where it would like to develop a more sophisticated riparian habitat called a SMART Buffer.

Log wall revetment installed on the Callan River
Soft engineering to reduce bank erosion and silt.

In areas with soft clay and silt soils, natural materials can be used to stabilise riverbanks and reduce erosion. These soft-engineering measures help prevent clay and sediment from entering the watercourse, improving water quality and reducing impacts on instream fauna.

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Installation

– Under 24 Hours

Fix & Care

– Under 12 Hours

Uninstallation

– Under 48 Hours

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