Lydia Burgess-Gamble
A late diagnosis of learning difficulties didn’t prevent a successful career in natural flood management
You might not expect a scientific career to be pursued by someone who has dyslexia and dyscalculia, but it hasn’t stopped Lydia Burgess-Gamble leading research into natural flood management at the Environment Agency.
“I only got diagnosed during the pandemic,” she says. “I’ve had an inkling my whole life that I was dyslexic, but I was at school in the 80s and early 90s and I don’t think it was what teachers looked out for.” It was the lockdown conditions of being confined to the desk and not getting out into the field that brought things to the fore – the fatigue brought on by constantly staring at numbers and writing reports. Since her assessment, simple changes such as the colour of her computer screen have made life easier. “I should have done it years ago,” she says.
Despite not doing particularly well at school (due to those undiagnosed learning difficulties), a degree in geography led to a PhD in river restoration and then a career with the Environment Agency.
For the last 10 years, she has been working in a small research team where she has developed an evidence base to demonstrate that restoring nature using natural flood management approaches can help reduce the risk of flooding and improve the environment for people and wildlife. This strand of Lydia’s career has culminated in a recently published global guide to natural flood management, compiled alongside colleagues in the USA and Netherlands.
“The Dutch couldn’t believe we are all about trying to hold water in catchments and slow the flow of water, whereas they want to get it out to sea as fast as possible in some cases,” says Lydia.
She is currently looking at the carbon sequestration potential of saltmarshes. They were thought to sequester between 2-8 tonnes of carbon per hectare, but research by Manchester Metropolitan University at Steart Marshes in Somerset found that the saltmarshes there were absorbing up to 30 tonnes. If this figure proves to be a truer reflection, then it could have important implications for these habitats.
“There will be more impetus as a country to protect and preserve the saltmarshes that we’ve got, and for the Environment Agency to potentially build bigger saltmarsh restoration sites.”