SIR, I wish to add a few points to the on-going discussion in your paper of the most recent flooding.

The knee-jerk response by local and national governments to events like this seems to be to reach for heavy earth-movers and thousands of tons of concrete.

This is a flawed response that runs against common hydrological understanding. At best, such measures only pass the problems on downstream. The causes of flooding always lie upstream and uphill, which is where the solutions must also be applied.

These issues are covered in great detail in a recent Guardian article by George Monbiot. He refers to a farmer-initiated, tree-planting project in the headwaters of the river Severn that was shown in a research programme to dramatically increase water absorption into the soil, thus reducing run-off and flooding downstream.

If applied on a large enough scale, such measures could reduce downstream flooding by up to 50 per cent. Of course, very large-scale tree planting carried out over a long enough timeframe also has the possibility of stabilising the climate change that is adding to these floods This information should be of great interest to anyone living in or near a floodplain. Contrary to current Government and European policy; to reduce flooding along the Thames, we should be persuading landowners and farmers in the Cotswolds to plant more trees.

John Baker, Braziers Park, Ipsden