News / Nature
Nature’s recovery: from strategy to action
Bristol loves its firsts. And for a city that prides itself on its green outlook, an environmental first is hard to beat.
So, the launch of the Local Nature Recovery Strategy was a cause for celebration for many. Not only because it was the first of such strategies to be published in England, but also because there’s a real belief it will make a significant difference for nature across the region.
Nearly 50 organisations, in consultation with landowners, communities and businesses, have worked together to develop the ‘roadmap for restoring, reconnecting and recovering nature’ which also provides a toolkit for residents to get involved.
is needed now More than ever
Metro mayor Dan Norris, who launched the Strategy at the West of England Nature Partnership (WENP) conference in November, has made big promises, suggesting it could encourage the return of glow worms, white-tailed eagles and pine martens.
But nature is a slow moving beast and, while we hope one day to open our wildlife-deprived eyes to a region bursting with biodiversity, now is the time to consider the first steps being taken towards this vision.
Why act for nature?
The Strategy outlines nine priority programmes for nature’s recovery: forest, grassland, rivers, urban nature and local wildlife sites, the Severn shoreline, levels and moors, returning species, tackling transport severance and monitoring.
It maps focus areas where action will have the most impact, for targeted local activity and financial investment. It’s not legislation, so it won’t force landowners to act or halt developments.
Instead, it is designed to ‘inform and encourage’ voluntary action, hoping to unite everyone behind the mission to restore nature. And where nature thrives, there will be wins for climate resilience and public health.
These overlapping benefits can be seen with environmental projects already underway. Expanding the Severn Estuary habitat – an internationally recognised coastal ecosystem, and one of the UK’s most important – provides high-tide roosts for migrating birds, reduces flood risk for farmers and improves water quality.
Planting 100,000 trees to establish the Lower Chew Forest in the Bristol-Avon catchment, one of the least forested parts of the UK, will yield new habitats, store or avert 54,000 tonnes of carbon over the next 30 years and create five kilometres of new walking paths.
And regeneration of the River Frome catchment area with ponds and woody dams will protect communities from flooding, extreme heat and air pollution caused by M32 traffic.
How the Strategy will act for rivers
Rivers are vital for nature’s recovery but the region’s watercourses are in poor health – photo: BART
“We’re failing,” says Simon Hunter, Bristol and Avon River Trust (BART) CEO, of the region’s water quality. “We are not hitting good ecological status. There’s numerous reasons for that – agricultural production, nutrients running off land, sewage (and) toxins from roads.
“Rivers need to be free-flowing. We’ve got amazing species in our Bristol-Avon catchment: Atlantic salmon, sea trout, European eels… They all need to go on a journey to spawn. But our rivers have been modified and straightened. Artificial hard banks have removed marginal habitat, wetlands have been drained.
“The rivers are the arteries of our landscape, and the base ecology – the flies that are food for the birds, bats and fish – start on the bottom of rivers. We need rivers to sustain wider life.”
Rewetting areas helps create habitats for creatures to move through landscapes – photo: BART
Hunter says the Strategy will help return our rivers to health by encouraging collaboration. Organisations bring their different skills, working collectively means information is streamlined and bringing landowners together enables landscape-scale change.
BART is working with “a whole bunch of different farmers to create a collective vision for farming but also for landscape and nature’s recovery”. They discuss issues like delivering produce sustainably, preventing run-off and returning some farmland to wetlands, river restoration and “beautiful floodplain meadows which are completely missing from our landscapes at the moment”.
“Our land is fragmented – lots of people own lots of little bits – so we need to work together to create these brilliant linking habitats and wildlife corridors,” says Hunter. “The rivers provide that opportunity.”
How the Strategy will act for pollinators
Wild pollinators are responsible for every third mouthful of food eaten but are in serious decline – photo: Marcus Wehrle
Avon Wildlife Trust are helping communities create green corridors for pollinators to travel around the region. Pollinator Pathways – part of the Strategy’s ‘grassland connections’ arm – aims to increase, improve and link up pollinator habitat stretching from the Mendips all the way through Bristol city and beyond.
In 2025 the project will improve around 200 hectares of habitats, and restore 2000 metres of boundaries like drystone walls, fencing and hedgerows. It’s essential work where 85-95 per cent of the UK’s insect-pollinated crops rely on wild pollinators and the loss of 97 per cent of wildflower meadows in the UK, combined with pesticide use and climate change, has caused a drastic decline in bees, butterflies and moths.
View this post on Instagram
With urban nature the long-term goal is to have groups taking action in every postcode: “We’ve got a little way to go on that but it’s a good goal to have!” says campaigns manager Stuart McCarthy-Thompson.
He believes the Strategy will empower residents to act locally: “Our local authority is one of the first to launch a toolkit. I think others will follow suit as it’s quite revolutionary. This is very much a template which would work elsewhere.
“The collaboration is one of the Strategy’s great strengths – working together is the best way forward. We know we want to have more land and sea under management for nature. The best way to do that is by working together and drawing on the strengths of all the individual organisations.”
How the Strategy will act for water voles
A rare sight of a water vole, Britain’s fastest declining mammal spotted in Lawrence Weston – photo: Dan Hodson
Eric Swithinbank, Avon Wildlife Trust’s community ecologist, is working with communities to protect Britain’s fastest declining mammal:
“I’ve been working on Lawrence Weston Moor with residents, tracking where the water voles are on the rhynes (a drainage ditch that turns wetland into pasture). We go out and find the little watery world they inhabit – their passageways and burrows, latrines and feeding signs,” he explains.
“Some of the rhynes have become very overgrown because there’s no large herbivores or real grazing on the site. The water voles don’t like crimped, short grass, but they don’t like it too overgrown, so we see strong signs of them in the middle mish mash of reeds, sedges and herbaceous vegetation.
Volunteers have been out on the rhynes in Lawrence Weston helping to spot the signs of water voles and improve their habitats – photo: Eric Swithinbank
“There’s a proper stronghold of voles in this fragment of ancient wetland that previously spanned Avonmouth and the Somerset Levels. The whole of Lawrence Weston and Avonmouth would have once been wetland marshes or reedbeds. We’re beginning to realise, as part of the Strategy, how important these wetlands are in connecting areas up.
“We used to fence off nature reserves in the countryside, but actually we need habitat connected with green corridors all the way from farmland into cities, from the seas up to the highlands. With climate change we need to make sure species in changing conditions, flooding or droughts, can move through the landscape to find breeding partners, new habitats and food.
“It’s also important within cities – research shows urban and countryside meadows are comparatively valuable for species diversity. In the countryside there’s a lot of monocultures and intensive dairy, whereas gardens, allotments, parkland and fragments of wetland on the outskirts of cities can be more diverse than greenbelt land. And we need to bring nature into the city so people can see and learn about it, start to care and then protect it.”
Main image: Festival of Nature
Read next:
Our top newsletters emailed directly to you
