A grey wagtail picks along a stream in Cornwall that nearly ran dry months ago. The bird is fine now. The land is not. Storm Goretti's wreckage still blocks the woodland entrance — Scots pines and oaks ripped from the ground. A mile away, a gorse break remains blackened from a late-summer wildfire that killed the western gorse before it could bloom. The common denominator is the climate crisis, but the piece's real argument is that nature-based interventions already demonstrably reduce the damage, and Britain is choosing not to scale them. The evidence cited is concrete and geographically specific. The Dartmoor Headwaters Project has shown that native woodland increases water infiltration compared with nearby grazed pasture, and that restoring peatland improves water storage — both slowing runoff during heavy rainfall. At Woodland Valley Farm near Truro, introduced beavers have improved water storage and floodplain absorption. In Tywi Forest in the Cambrian mountains, rewetted peatlands proved resilient to wildfires, with sphagnum moss helping stall fire spread. Mixed hazel and sweet chestnut canopies cool the air beneath them during high heat. These are not hypothetical interventions. They are running projects with observable outcomes — water infiltration data from Dartmoor, fire-resistance evidence from Natural Resources Wales, beaver-managed hydrology near Truro. The question is not whether nature-based solutions work but why they remain demonstration-scale curiosities rather than national infrastructure. The answer is structural. Peatland restoration, beaver reintroduction, and native woodland planting compete for attention and funding against hard infrastructure — flood walls, pumping stations, drainage schemes — that is easier to cost, contract, and photograph at ribbon-cuttings. Nature-based solutions produce diffuse, hard-to-attribute benefits across long timescales. They do not fit neatly into five-year political cycles or capital expenditure budgets. Britain is described here as "severely nature-depleted," and the piece frames this depletion as a vulnerability multiplier. A landscape stripped of its natural buffers — peatlands drained, woodlands cleared, rivers straightened — amplifies every storm, drought, and fire. The damage from Goretti was not just weather; it was weather hitting land with no shock absorbers. The diary format is modest by design, but the structural argument is sharp: the costs of climate damage are socialised across communities and ecosystems, while the benefits of restoration projects remain localised and underfunded. One intense winter storm could bring yet more destruction. Next summer, wildfire risk returns. The interventions exist. The political will to deploy them at scale does not. The grey wagtail disappears. The stream purls on. The land waits.
