Ribble Rivers Trust wins national wild salmon conservation award
The Ribble Rivers Trust has won a prestigious new national award for wild salmon conservation, supporting a community-led river restoration project that will both protect an endangered British species and help reduce local flood risk.
Launched this autumn, ‘The Orri’ is a new community-based salmon conservation award from the North Atlantic Salmon Fund (UK) named in honour of its internationally respected founder, Orri Vigfússon.
The Lancashire-based charity was selected as the inaugural winner for its project ‘Hodder Together’, which focuses on restoring salmon habitat in the River Hodder while actively involving local communities, schools and anglers.
Jack Spees, CEO of Ribble Rivers Trust, said: “We’re delighted to have won this competitive award. The £10,000 Orri grant, alongside NASF’s support to crowdfund a further £10,000, will allow us to deliver real impact on multiple levels.
We’ll be engaging local schoolchildren in citizen science surveys, supporting apprentices in hands-on river restoration, and working with local anglers to monitor salmon spawning after new gravel is added.”
The project will install berms (small in channel “shelfs”) and introduce additional gravel to create riffles (places where salmon spawn) and pools (for juvenile salmon to grow) into the river. These features slow water flow, create vital spawning habitat for salmon, and- when delivered at scale- help reduce flood risk.
“As well as improving conditions for salmon, these nature-based solutions can help mitigate the increased flooding we’ve seen over the last 50 years,” added Spees. “That’s crucial for communities here in the Ribble Valley and across the UK.”
Salmon in crisis
Wild Atlantic salmon in the UK were upgraded to Endangered status by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2023, due to pressures including river barriers, pollution, habitat degradation and rising water temperatures.
NASF (UK) launched The Orri award to support local river communities to reconnect with salmon and take practical action to restore degraded waterways to healthy ecosystems.
Robert Sloss, chairman of NASF (UK), said: “The good news is that community-led, in-river initiatives like this one really do work. We see improvements quite quickly in the number of salmon redds and in the number of adult fish returning from the sea to spawn.”
What happens next
The Hodder Together project will begin practical work in late spring 2026, with a crowdfunding campaign launching in February and March to raise the remaining funds.
Charlotte Ireland Pope, fund-raising officer at Ribble Rivers Trust, said: “Winning The Orri award is hugely exciting. It gives us a proof of concept that we can scale up across the wider catchment for the benefit of both river health and local communities.
“Involving local people builds skills, supports environmental careers, and delivers wellbeing benefits from spending time outdoors in the beautiful Ribble Valley. To everyone reading this locally – watch this space. We’ll need your help in 2026.”
To follow the progress of the Hodder Together Orri Award project, supporters can subscribe to the newsletter at nasf.org.uk or contact Ribble Rivers Trust directly.
The Ribble Catchment is the area of land that is drained by the River Ribble and its major tributaries; the Hodder, Calder, Darwen and Douglas. It covers a varied landscape, from the rural hills of the Yorkshire Dales and the source of the River Ribble, to major urban areas of Lancashire.