Thinking big about wildlife and ecological recovery

National Parks and AONBs are our finest landscapes. They hold the largest tracts of remaining semi-natural habitats, and thus they have huge potential to become core components of coherent and resilient ecological networks. 

This will involve improving, expanding and joining-up existing wildlife sites, and creating areas of new habitat like woods, heaths and wetlands. These networks will increase the chances of wildlife successfully adapting to climate change and other pressures. At the same time, these high quality habitats will provide people with vital ‘ecosystem services’ like clean water, climate regulation and beautiful places for recreation.

We bring together (see our joint ambition statement Think Big!) and work with a large number of organisations and individuals to help achieve a step change in wildlife habitats in protected landscapes.

Together, we want to:

• Involve farmers, land managers and local communities in discussions about how to achieve ecological networks and how they can benefit from them
• Ensure the protected landscapes management planning process identifies opportunities for ecological networks
• Secure a public policy and funding framework that encourages and enables ecological networks to happen (e.g. well-funded agri-environment schemes through the Common Agricultural Policy from 2014; appropriate wildlife protection through the National Planning Policy Framework)
• Identify new funding sources and markets for the goods and services provided by ecological networks to ensure their long term sustainability (e.g. payments for water quality improvements; payments to off-set carbon emissions by tree planting and peatland restoration etc)

We recently held two seminars looking at how this work could be taken forward. The reports and presentations of these seminars can be found below:

Making space for nature in National Parks, April 2011

Ecological networks in southern protected landscapes, September 2011 

Please donate to our fighting fund today to help us to keep campaigning on wildlife issues. Find out more...