Introducing Fens Transition Lab

Today North Star Transition starts investigating how a Fens Transition Lab would work across the East of England. Jyoti Banerjee lays out how our collaboration with Anglian Water and the Environment Agency will impact the lives of all who dwell in the Fens.

The Fens is a naturally marshy region in the East of England. It was drained centuries ago, but much of it is low-lying and threatened by flooding. The Environment Agency has started Fens 2100+, a programme designed to work out what infrastructure is needed to maintain the Fens over the next century. At the same time, Anglian Water is constructing two reservoirs across Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire which will provide the water needed by the region’s 600,000 inhabitants.

 Into this environment, North Star Transition has been invited to assess how its Transition Lab concept  could work to bring in a wholistic view of the changes that could occur across health, farming, transport, energy and the like, while these large-scale environmental projects are being implemented.

 The Fens are nationally important for agriculture. They contribute significantly to the local economy, supporting the food and rural tourism economy. The area accounts for 50% of Grade 1 agricultural land in England, producing 37% of all vegetables   and 38% of its bulbs and flowers.

 The challenges of flood risk, drought, and water supply are growing due to climate change, which will have wider social, economic, and environmental implications on development, connectivity, and national food security in this catchment.

 Infrastructure to manage water in The Fens is in operation twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. Around £2bn in partnership funding is needed to continue this regime across all operators which isn’t sustainable, physically or financially. Partners are also limited in working together to agree solutions by remit, policy, or competition.

 Public and private water infrastructure owners are working individually to transition the Fens, and the people who live there, to a future adapted for climate change. Anglian Water’s forthcoming reservoirs will bring over £4bn of infrastructure investment to the area. However, long-term funded solutions are not close to delivering a wider transformation for people and resources.  Organisations are working in silos in their fields to play their part in transitioning The Fens to adapt, but existing governance and multiple infrastructure owners make it difficult to take an integrated, cross-sector approach.

Proposing a Fens Transition Lab

North Star Transition, alongside its partners UCL Climate Action Unit, Mott MacDonald and Apella Advisors, was invited to consider setting up Fens Transition Lab for the Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire Fens with water infrastructure owners and users.

We agreed to investigate the feasibility of such an approach. We think that Fens Transition Lab is unique in bringing all partners to the table in an innovative process using behavioural science, enabling shared objectives and action to create systems change. Importantly, the Lab will enable resourcing of the outcomes including future funding, funding instruments and potentially policy change.

The Lab will collaboratively develop solutions to the impacts of climate change on future water and food security, sustainable agriculture, energy, health, transport and employment in the catchment. The Lab will work with North Star Transition’s landscape finance group to help mainstream financial institutions collaboratively develop the tools, the institutional relationships and the governance arrangements to finance the landscape transformation ideas that emerge from the Transition Lab.

This innovation will support The Fens and areas in the top 10% most deprived with the future risks of drought, flooding, Ill-health and food supply. These are serious risks which statutory bodies will need to address in this catchment. The Transition Lab project will establish a virtual laboratory bringing together key players across disciplines and cultures to reframe problems, identify obstacles of change, co-learn, and construct novel co-creative solutions. Importantly, we will raise the resources necessary to carry out the actions, through blending public and private finance.

Why we are investigating the Fens for a Transition Lab

The concept of the Fens Transition Lab builds on our transition labs that have been operational in Wales and Scotland since 2020, each with over 200 organisations participating in them, from across food, health, business, government and the environment.  

A Transition Lab seeking to transform the Wye and Usk catchments started in March 2023 with over 50 stakeholders across the water, farming, health, and food sectors. Today, there are nearly 200 stakeholders participating in the work and they have identified six different areas that they want to work on to create a plan that meets three criteria: it needs to be transformational, locally-led and investable.

This approach will be investigated across a wider, more diverse catchment (the Fens) for this project.

Currently, multiple organisations in these catchments function in their silos, with little integrated thinking, and no alignment of strategic purpose. There is no existing answer to the challenge of adaptation of The Fens. Instead, Fens Transition Lab brings a new way of collaborative and co-creative thinking to the water sector, in the Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire catchments.

Led by North Star Transition and working in partnership with Anglian Water and the Environment Agency, the project will use the existing Future Fens: Integrated Adaptation partnership (FF:IA) comprising of the Environment Agency, Water Resources East, the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority, Anglian Water, other local authorities, and various other public and non-governmental partners to work across sectors towards tangible and funded solutions quickly. FF:IA, a programme launched at COP26 by Peter Simpson, Anglian Water’s CEO, has already brought together over 120 stakeholders across the region, a great start for the Transition Lab.

 North Star Transition has key partnerships it expects to use on the project:

a) University College London Climate Action Unit, led by Dr Kris de Meyer, a leading behavioural scientist, leads the facilitation and co-production of our Transition Labs

b) Apella Advisors, a purpose advisory service working with financial institutions and corporates

c) Mott MacDonald, a leading engineering, environmental and digital consultancy who have extensive experience in the Fens and will bring their engaged stakeholders to the project.

We hope to build on the FF:IA’s work by bringing together a very large spectrum of stakeholders (including those who may be unlikely allies) from different sectors, disciplines, and cultures to reframe problems, set shared objectives, identify obstacles of change, co-learn, and create novel co-creative solutions.

All the pieces of the system we wish to transform – from farmers to finance – will walk through a process of collaborative learning and implementation, ensuring they understand solutions, see themselves within them and can enact them. We also expect to fund the actions that need to be taken on the ground through the use of investment resources from mainstream financial institutions.

The Transition Lab approach has proved to be a fruitful way of addressing complex systemic problems, as evidenced by the experience of Wales Transition Lab which challenged the status quo of how to manage food and its connections to land, health, environmental and financial impacts.

We seek the same outcomes across the Fens.

So what might these outcomes be?

For the next four months, Fens Transition Lab is in an investigative phase to assess the feasibility of such a project being carried out. So what might we expect to see happen if the Transition Lab operated to its fullest extent? We don’t know the answer to this, but we are expecting positive outcomes in the following ways:

·        A set of innovative but realistic solutions co-developed by all stakeholders for the adaptation of The Fens to climate change

·        A systemic approach that simultaneously transforms the dynamics of The Fens toward healthy and safe waters, thriving biodiversity and fair and sustainable local social development

·        A financial and governance model that brings an adequate level of resources involving one or more mainstream financial institutions and other stakeholders including public sector, local investors and charities

·        A multistakeholder platform to monitor and assess progress, if relevant develop corrective actions and identify other related issues that require solving

All outcomes would have far-reaching benefits and could create a template and tools that other landscapes will be able to emulate across the UK.