What is CamEO?
Background
In March 2011, the UK government announced that it would review its strategy for river basin management to help meet the demands of the Water Framework Directive (a European Union initiative made in 2000, intended to improve water quality across the EU by 2015). This resulted in the 2013 policy statement ‘A Catchment Based Approach: Improving the Quality of our water Environment’, which set out a framework to create ‘strong local support, consensus, effective coordination and efficient channelling of existing and new funding … to deliver local aspirations for the water environment’. It was ‘deliberately not trying to prescribe how and when local initiatives should work’. The policy enabled the establishment of Catchment Partnerships within England’s ten River Basin Management Districts (RBMD), each of which would cover a group of rivers or ‘operational catchments’. For the most part, Catchment Partnerships do not have incorporated legal status, and are ‘hosted’ by other organisations, including environmental charities and Rivers Trusts.
The CamEO Catchment Partnership
There are now 106 Catchment Partnerships in England. The Cam Ely Ouse Catchment Partnership (CamEO) is one of eleven Catchment Partnerships in the Anglian RBMD. CamEO covers parts of Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk. It comprises four river systems that all flow north and west into the Great Ouse: the Cam (including the Rhee and Granta, total 29 waterbodies); the Lark (12 waterbodies); the Little Ouse and Thet (19 waterbodies); and the Wissey (9 waterbodies). But because of the historic drainage of the Fenland regions of this area and their pumped management by the Internal Drainage Boards (IDB), the downstream reaches of all four of these river systems are, for the purposes of Environment Agency analysis, removed from their rivers and grouped together as the South Levels.
On the EA’s Catchment Data Explorer website, each water body is given its current ecological status. Most CamEo waterbodies are classed as Moderate, seven are considered ‘Good’, and another seven ‘Poor’ or ‘Bad’. Further tables display the many and various Reasons for Not Achieving Good (RNAG) status, including levels of flow and water quality.
Catchment Planning
Each of the Catchment Partnerships is supported by a small grant from the UK government Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). For this, each is required to design and implement a Catchment Management Plan for water quality improvement. There was no blueprint for what these plans should look like, and they are very variable across the country; the wholeinitiative was deliberately community-led, designed to engage ‘people and groups from across communities at a local level to help improve our precious water environments’ (DEFRA website). Accordingly, the policy statement anticipates that the majority of actions taken will be small scale, with ‘specific (locally focused) objectives’ (pp. 6-7). It also assumes that rivers are the result simply of surface water and drainage. However, river flows for the majority of water bodies in CamEO depend on the emergence of ground water, via springs from the chalk aquifer, or in the boulder clay regions, from perched water. Their flows, and therefore the habitats they support, are heavily dependent on the level of abstraction for public water supply, farming and industry by private companies under licence from the EA.
In the Anglian RBMD, Anglian Water is financing a number of different approaches to catchment planning. The Catchment Plan for the Lark was commissioned from Norfolk Rivers Trust in 2022 and was prepared through in-person walk overs across the Lark and its tributaries. This produced a report including maps, and descriptions of the many locations where the river is straightened, impounded by former locks and weirs, or disconnected from its floodplain by rerouting, dredging, and embanking. However, in terms of how best to design a plan for the long term restoration of the river, RLCP is indebted to the Fluvial Audit prepared by Prof. David Sear (University of Southampton), and it is this which is informing our current plans for the Flagship Chalkstream restoration project with Anglian Water.
The Catchment Based Approach
The developing, more holistic concept of the Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) to river maintenance and improvement is perhaps the most significant, and perhaps unforeseen, development of this slightly haphazard history. At its best, a CaBA approach considers river systems and their landscapes, the ecologies they support, and the uses to which they are put by human populations, whether for public water supply, food, industry, housing or recreation, as an indivisible single system. There is increasing realisation that the small-scale project approach is not enough. We need holistic considerations of how river morphology, geological morphology, soil structure, land use, and vegetation interact, and how these are impacted by water abstraction and recycling. Without this, sustainable improvement in the health of our watercourses, our soils, and indeed our citizens, not to mention better resilience to the increasing flood and drought risks posed by a combination of climate change and development across the region, is impossible. The Rivers Trust has adopted the CaBA banner with the aim of delivering this approach nationally.
RLCP as host of CamEO
RLCP became the new host of CamEO in May 2025. We are championing the gathering and sharing of better data, and the more holistic approach to Catchment Planning. Sir Jon Cunliffe’s investigation into the current state of water resources in the UK which reported in June 2025 recognised the value of CaBA, of nature based solutions to river restoration, and of the Catchment Partnerships. It recommended that the Catchment Partnerships should be better resourced, a recommendation that is also in the 2026 White Paper.
The highpoint of the CamEO year is the annual conference which brings together representatives of environmental NGOs, our regional water companies, local government, farmers, academics, and members of the EA and DEFRA. Last year’s conference took place in the Guildhall in Bury St Edmunds (photos here). This year we are at The Carnegie in Thetford where the theme will be ‘Earth and Water’ and the keynote speaker will be Professor David Sear, who invented the fluvial audit technique, and authored the recent audit of the Lark Catchment, which has significantly influenced our approach to Catchment Planning.