Thank you to everyone from across the lowland water management community who attended our first ever ADA Environment Day on Thursday 2 February at Park Farm in Thorney, near Peterborough.

It was a pleasure to welcome board members and officers from drainage districts across both England and Wales to hear from so many knowledgeable experts on what was aptly World Wetlands Day. The day exceeded our expectations in terms of attendance, with positive engagement around all of the topics discussed. It truly made the day so useful, informative, and a pleasure to host.

We hope this event has helped spread learning about best practice approaches and given drainage boards greater confidence to enhance their local aquatic environment whilst managing and maintaining safe water levels and flood risk infrastructure. As the event chairperson, Michael Sly commented, “our drains are our inverted hedgerows”, acting as natural highways to provide ecological connectivity across the Fens, in the same way that our hedgerows do in other farmed landscapes.

Our thanks go to all of our fantastically informative speakers for their contributions, to Martin van Nieuwenhuijzen from Aquatic Control Engineering (ACE) for their generous sponsorship and support, and to our delegates for participating on the day. Last, but by no means least, thank you to Michael Sly for chairing the day wonderfully and to the team at Park Farm for making us so welcome at their fantastic meeting venue in the heart of the Fens. We really enjoyed putting the day together and are grateful for the positive feedback we have received during and following the event.

All of the presentation slides from the day can now be downloaded at the link below. We are already thinking about next year’s Environment Day when we will return to Park Farm. If you have a topic suggestion, or would be interested in presenting at next year’s event, please do get in touch.

Environment Day 2023 | Agenda | Environment Day 2023 | Presentations | Image Gallery