Large Scale Conservation in Britain
In the last ten years, a large number of projects have been developed across the UK to create large or ‘landscape scale’ conservation areas or zones, often based around existing conservation sites, but involving extensive ecological restoration. Such projects have been developed by a number of organisations, particularly the Wildlife Trusts (‘Living Landscapes’), RSPB (‘Futurescapes’), Butterfly Conservation (‘Landscape Target Areas’) and the National Trust. Government conservation organisations such as Natural England have also developed landscape-scale schemes.
Such approaches were encouraged by the 2010 review of England’s wildlife sites and ecological network (Making Space for Nature). This outlined the need for conservation sites to form a ‘coherent and resilient’ ecological The Government published its response to the Lawton Committee on the same day in June 2011 as the White Paper The Natural Choice: securing the value of nature, endorsing the idea of large scale conservation.
This innovation represents both an increase in the scale and ambition of conservation and also in the way land is secured for conservation management
This project is studying how large scale conservation projects have been created in the UK. It is investigating in particular 1) the kinds of partnerships or other arrangements that have been used to crate them; 2) the way science has been applied to their design; 3) how they have been influenced by thinking about climate change.
This study is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the University of Southampton. It builds on a larger project being undertaken by Southampton with DEFRA funding on large-scale conservation initiatives. This project includes a web-based survey of large scale conservation projects (being done by Southampton), and a programme of in-depth interviews with project managers (being done by Cambridge.