When it comes to all-natural flood control, it’s hard to beat the benefits offered freely by our furry, buck-toothed friend the beaver. Maybe.

From Europe to the American West, beavers—once hunted to near-extinction or maligned as destructive nuisances—are making a comeback. Some of that rally is thanks to environmental groups who see them as an answer to the ravages of climate change and human-caused environmental damage.

“We found beavers do restoration work better than people,” Celeste Coulter, of the Oregon-based North Coast Land Conservancy told the Wall Street Journal. “We can spend $200,000 putting wood into a stream, cabling down logs. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Put in a colony of beavers and it always works.”

From drought control to flood control to restoring valuable wetlands, there doesn’t seem to be much the amphibious rodent can’t do.

According to an Atlantic article about an Eastern Washington repopulation effort, Beaver dams fight drought by retaining snowmelt and rainwater and preserving groundwater. One study found that a beaver colony could add as much water to the ecosystem in a day as a 200-year flood event, according to the article.

But if flooding is your problem, beavers still have your back, as one British effort at reintroducing beavers has confirmed. The project used manmade means of creating the same dynamic as a beaver dam to see if repopulating the area with beavers—hunted-out since the 16th century—would the have desired flood effects.

“This project is interesting because they re-created a series of features in the landscape that trap water and hold it” ecologist Derek Gow, told the Telegraph. “So when it rains hard, the water comes down into things called leaky dams which leech water slowly. Instead of hitting the village in 25 minutes, the peak of a flood might take 45 minutes and by the time it does, it's lost its force and power.”

Faced with the options of building (and maintaining) the structures or importing beavers to do the job for free, the UK Environment Agency is keeping an optimistic eye on the final project results.

Not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of the rodent’s resurgence though. For many, beavers are great if they aren’t mucking up human flood control efforts, cutting down fruit trees and other desirable vegetation, or putting water where we don’t want it.

“We’re caught between a rock and a hard place,” Jeff Rodgers of the Oregon Plan for Salmon and Watersheds told the Oregon Quarterly last year. “We know that beavers are extremely valuable in providing ecological benefits to fish and other wildlife. At the same time, it’s also a fact that beavers can do a lot of property damage.”

In many instances, human–beaver throwdowns consist of small acts of defiance like repeatedly damming a culvert. Other times, the charges are more, well, damning—like when beaver damage was blamed for a dam collapse in Poland resulting in flooding that killed 15 people. Other objections include those of people who simply don’t like the idea of repopulation, including resisters in Scotland who see a reintroduction effort there as environmental meddling.

Certainly beavers are guilty of thwarting at least some human activity. But given the benefits made possible by having an army of industrious little dam-builders on our side, perhaps there’s a way to overcome the negatives. That is the question, said Rodgers.

“It’s an ecosystem thing. There are a lot of things wrong. A lot of things have unraveled that we need to put back together. The question is, if we kick-start it—by providing the habitat beavers need, then not killing them when they show up—can we let beavers do it, so we can go on and do other things?”