Natural England launch strategy to recover nature

Natural England is aiming to spark nature recovery across Britain with its fresh  strategy that takes a four pronged approach to England’s environment.

With biodiversity remaining a hot topic as the debate around Net Zero rages on, the government has four key outcomes it wishes to achieve:

• Recovering Nature – Restoring natural systems like rivers, wetlands, forests by tackling root causes of decline and prioritising large-scale recovery
• Building Better Places – Embedding nature into homes, infrastructure, and investment from the start to create greener, healthier, more investible places
• Improving Health and Wellbeing – Expanding access to green and blue spaces where people live and partnering with the health, education and employment sectors to unlock the benefits of nature
• Delivering Security through Nature – Supporting nature-friendly farming, forestry, and fishing to supplies of food, water, clean air, and improving climate resilience in the future

Tony Juniper, Chair of Natural England, said: “Nature provides the foundation stones of our growth, health and security. The threats facing nature today are also threats to our way of life.

“The scale of the challenge facing us means that we need to increase our ambition for nature recovery and change the way we have worked. Succeeding means thinking carefully about where and how to target our efforts so that we can do bigger and better, as well as promote collaboration on nature across society.

“We can grow the economy and meet the government’s stretching legal environment targets – this strategy sets out a path to do just that.”

Marian Spain, Chief Executive of Natural England, said: “There is a huge positive opportunity at hand to unlock the power of Nature in pursuit of wider national priorities for growth health and security.

“We know this can be done because there are already many examples of this kind of strategic and broad-based approach seen up down the country, from the agricultural landscapes of Lincolnshire to the heathlands of Surrey and from internationally important wetlands in Dorset to the uplands of the Pennines, where diverse partnerships for Nature’s recovery are bringing a wide range of benefits for people as well as wildlife.

“Time is short but as we are setting out today with ambition, partnership and collaboration we can turn the decline of Nature toward recovery.”

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