1: Introduction
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1.1: Context
The Aire Resilience Company (ARC) is a non-profit organisation that will be formally constituted as a Community Interest Company (CIC) in August 2025. ARC has been conceived and developed by a team comprising public-sector and third-sector representatives from Leeds City Council (LCC), the Environment Agency (EA), the Rivers Trust (RT) and its member organisation the Aire Rivers Trust (ART), and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust (YWT).
ARC’s mission is to further enhance flood-risk protection for the city of Leeds, by delivering Natural Flood Management interventions (NFM) in the upper Aire catchment. Methods including tree and hedgerow planting, soil aeration, and the creation of buffer strips and earth bunds will be used to reduce the flow of water from upland areas into the Aire, thereby reducing peak river flow and keeping the city safer.
The nature-based measures proposed by ARC are intended as a complement to the ‘hard-engineered’ defences of the recently-completed Leeds Flood Alleviation Scheme. ARC’s activities are designed to offset the anticipated, additional flood risk associated with the projected impacts of climate change over the next fifty years.
ARC’s funding model is predicated on a blended finance approach, involving both initial capital expenditure (circa £2m) and annual maintenance spending (£400k per annum). The ‘CapEx’ element, funding larger-scale interventions such as earthworks, is to be met through public-sector grants, while maintenance costs are to be borne by private-sector contributions. This novel approach recognises that public funding for flood defences is (a) necessarily finite, and (b) usually provided in the form of one-off, fixed-term grants. Public grants do not typically support the costs of maintaining and reiterating interventions over time – processes which are essential to NFM measures such as soil aeration.
ARC thus proposes to source annual financial contributions from a broad consortium of Leeds-based businesses. The inspiration for this approach comes from a successful, similar scheme that was recently developed by the Rivers Trust in the Lancashire catchment of the River Wyre. A group of corporate ‘buyers’ in Fleetwood provided funds to local farmers (as the ‘sellers’ of ecosystem services) for the implementation of NFM measures on their land.
In the Wyre example, the necessary consortium of buyers was in place from the outset of the scheme. The Aire catchment, by contrast, is larger and more complex. A key challenge for the ARC team has thus been to identify and engage appropriate private-sector partners.
1.2: Challenge
This need for engagement was the key factor informing the development of Finding the Story Arc. The Project Lead, Stephen Scott-Bottoms (SSB), is Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the University of Manchester (UoM). He has collaborated previously with some of ARC’s partner organisations on projects exploring community and stakeholder relationships with the River Aire. (1) Most recently, he served as an ‘embedded researcher’ within Leeds City Council’s Flood Risk Management team, as part of the UK Climate Resilience programme (2022-23). Finding the Story Arc thus extended an established collaboration between UoM and LCC.
Finding the Story Arc was funded by a ‘Proof of Concept’ grant from UoM’s Impact Acceleration Account (IAA). The concept to be ‘proven’ was that arts-based engagement methods, of the kind developed through SSB’s previous research, could be usefully applied to the task of leveraging funding for an innovative initiative such as ARC. These methods had not previously been applied in a business-facing context. ​​
1 SSB’s Multi-Story Water project ran from 2012-17, in various iterations. Among its key achievements was the ‘Friends of Fred’ dialogue group for professional stakeholders in the water sector, which met monthly from 2015-18 (documented in the Local Environment journal article, ‘Who is a Hydrocitizen?: The use of dialogic arts methods as a research tool with water professionals’). In 2021, the Aire Rivers Trust presented a touring production of SSB’s play This Island’s Mine, in support of their DNAire project (Developing the Natural Aire).
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