Broadly Speaking – Details, episodes & analysis

In this final episode of Broadly Speaking, the focus turns to how we relate to wetlands: emotionally, culturally, and practically. Through stories of species recovery, farming adaptation and landscape history, Andrea Kelly explores what it really means to live with water in a place shaped by centuries of human intervention.

From swallowtail butterflies and bitterns, to farmers managing peat grazing marshes, to writers helping us see wetlands differently, this episode reflects on the hopes of those who's daily lives are embedded in this special landscape.  

You can read more information about the Broads Peat Partnership by clicking here.

Music is from mobygratis

Produced with SOUNDYARD

Funded by Defra and the Environment Agency

Created by the Broads Authority in association with SoundYard

In the Broads, water is everything — and increasingly, it’s unpredictable.

This episode of Broadly Speaking focuses on how water is managed in a low-lying, climate-exposed landscape where flooding, drought, food production and nature all compete for the same resource. Andrea Kelly speaks with people working on drainage, catchment-scale planning and farming to explore whether our water systems are fit for demand.

You can read more information about the Broads Peat Partnership by clicking ⁠here⁠.

Music is from ⁠mobygratis⁠

Produced with ⁠SOUNDYARD⁠

The ground beneath the broads holds one of our greatest climate opportunities — and one of our biggest risks.

In this episode of Broadly Speaking, Andrea Kelly explores lowland peat: what it is, why it matters, and how centuries of drainage have turned it from a carbon store into a carbon source. With insight from ecology, land management and policy, the conversation looks at why peatlands are central to the UK’s Net Zero ambitions — and why rewetting them is both urgent and complex.

You can read more information about the Broads Peat Partnership by clicking ⁠here⁠.

Music is from ⁠mobygratis⁠

Produced with ⁠SOUNDYARD⁠

Peatlands may be the UK’s biggest untapped solution to Net Zero. Drained lowlands that once supported livelihoods now sit at the heart of a climate dilemma. In three episodes, natural history writers Patrick Barkham and Helen Baczkowska, alongside those who manage and own the Broads National Park, explore a landscape on the edge of change.