Rewilding Success: How Restored Wetlands Kept Somerset Green During Record Heatwaves

Aerial footage released by the National Trust shows that the rewilded sections of its Holnicote estate — where rivers have been returned to their natural courses and wetlands rebuilt — held their color while the surrounding farmland turned to dust.

The footage is more than a visual curiosity. It offers measurable evidence that nature-based interventions can buffer landscapes against the compound climate stress — heat, drought, and fire — that policymakers increasingly treat as the new baseline.

What the landscape shows

At Holnicote, the contrast is stark and quantifiable. Rewilded zones with reconnected river systems and restored wetland "sponges" retained moisture and vegetation cover across all five heatwaves this summer. The conventional countryside next door did not. According to the project team, the rewilded areas functioned as natural water reservoirs during dry spells and as flood buffers during heavy rainfall events downstream.

Ben Eardley, the Holnicote project manager, framed the result as a direct reversal of a century-long drainage policy: for generations, the UK pulled water off land as fast as possible; here, the team is doing the opposite, letting the land hold it. Eardley added that the same natural processes helping wildlife recover are simultaneously helping nearby villages manage flood risk — a dual return on the same intervention.

Why the data matters now

The experiment lands in a year that has already supplied its own warnings. Wildfire ripped through the lowland heath at Dunwich, another National Trust site, this summer, destroying habitat that had taken decades to establish. Harry Bowell, the Trust's director of land and nature, pointed to another El Niño forecast for the coming year, which is expected to increase the frequency of floods, droughts, heatwaves, and fires across the country.

That context gives the Somerset footage weight beyond aesthetics. More than 90% of the UK's wetlands have been lost over the past century, and restoring them is increasingly framed as core climate-adaptation infrastructure rather than optional conservation. The Holnicote results directly contradict claims from some commentators who have blamed rewilding for causing wildfires — the data here shows the opposite relationship.

What to track next

Three signals will indicate whether the Holnicote pattern scales beyond a single estate:

• Replication. Whether other landowners adopt similar wetland reconnection and river-meandering projects, and whether they report comparable drought resilience under the same weather conditions.
• Policy. Whether public funding shifts toward treating restored landscapes as protective infrastructure for communities, rather than as separate conservation line items.
• Monitoring. Long-term hydrology and biodiversity data from the Holnicote site, which could establish a baseline for measuring returns on nature-based investment across the region.

For now, the Somerset landscape has done what controlled studies often cannot: it has produced a visible, side-by-side comparison of two approaches to land management under identical weather conditions. The green held. The brown didn't.