Raising the bar: improving nature in our National Parks

The thirteen National Parks in England and Wales are among the most beautiful and valued landscapes in the British Isles. They contain breath-taking scenery, rare wildlife and cultural heritage, and provide space for a wide range of recreational opportunities. Visiting the Parks offers a chance to experience dark skies and tranquillity. They are, therefore, valuable in supporting our health and well-being, offering a chance to ‘get away from it all’. They are also home to rural communities and are important to the rural economy.

The Parks are extremely important to wildlife and their international recognition depends on their role in relation to nature conservation. Wildlife rich landscapes are also an essential part of the National Park purposes – wildlife is a critical component of natural beauty and people’s enjoyment of the Parks. In a survey we undertook in 2016 that included asking people what, if anything, would improve the Parks, the strongest themes that came out were improving the conservation of wildlife and making them ‘wilder’.

The Parks are not, however, perfect and an important part of Campaign for National Parks’ role is to be ambitious about the potential to improve them. From reports such as the State of Nature 2016 and Britain’s Mammals 2018 we also know that wildlife is in serious decline.

The National Parks are not generally bucking those national trends. We believe the Parks should be raising the bar on nature and, through innovative, landscape scale approaches, demonstrating how the declines in wildlife can be halted and reversed. This report considers how that might be achieved.