The Westcountry Rivers Trust believes in landscape scale conservation and early projects of this type were recognised and counted among a handful of global examples of sustainable conservation by the secretariat for the Convention on Biological Diversity (www.cornwallriversproject.org.uk).

The Trust believes that one of the key focuses of future river conservation must be to target our activity at managing 'pollution risk' and to do so, we feel that we need to pay land-owners a fair price to shift their activity away from food production in certain high risk areas.

The funding for this work will be raised from groups who benefit from the changes. For example, it is cheaper for a water company to pay a farmer not to farm in a risky area rather than pay the cost for continual filtering of polluted water after it is abstracted.

The risky areas are only a small proportion of the catchment, but collectively these small areas deliver wider public benefits known as Ecosystem Services, e.g. reconnected biodiversity corridors, flood defence, water purification, drought management, carbon sequestration and recreation opportunities, to name a few.

Currently WRT have two substantial Land Management Projects, one Strategic and one Practical.

The Strategic project is a £4 million EU funded project to develop cost/benefit demonstrations to encourage organisations to pay for catchment conservation and wider Ecosystem Services as described above (www.projectwater.eu).

The second is a real life, practical demonstration of the principle whereby South West Water are funding several catchment scale agricultural restoration projects valued in excess of £9 million, over the next 5 years (www.upstreamthinking.co.uk). These improvements to river catchments deliver the wider EcoSystem Services mentioned above, but also make sense to the Water Company as the most cost-effective method to secure long term clean drinking water supplies for the benefit of all.