Volunteer tree and flood warden in Harborough wins leading eco accolade

Bruce Durham, who lives near Market Harborough, has landed a national River Champion award.

The local environmental warrior has been honoured after he helped to set up the Harborough Woodland group.

“I am delighted to receive this important national award.

“It's a privilege to work with our wonderful volunteers with river, flood and tree wardens who provide skilled capacity and whose family and friends build desperately-needed landowner trust by planting free trees and hedges,” said Bruce.

“This trust initiates opportunities for large scale natural flood management (NFM) supported by our professional specialists and now includes a stage zero and an 18-hectare confluence opportunity with eight other potential schemes after just two years.

“The upper Welland (river) is in a clay basin with the second-lowest woodland cover in the UK and we flood.

“All our rivers are poor or bad status and we do not benefit from large landowners such as the National Trust or the RSPB.

“We're determined to make our Welland a priority using experience from other community groups in the UK as water shortage will make the Welland strategically important.

“And widespread natural flood management will help protect our biodiversity and communities from the 30 per cent to 50 per cent increase in peak flow (EA).

“We're empowered by our children's future and trained by our heroes such as slowtheflow.net as innovation comes from communities and business,” added Bruce.

“We have also been nominated for a BBC Environmental Award later this year.”

You can check out Harborough Woodland on their website here: https://harboroughwoodland.com/