Hopefully some long running sagas will finish in 2014 – it is to be hoped that the final proposal for an airport in the Thames will finally be consigned to history despite a reprieve for more evidence by the Airports Commission in their interim report published last December.
I often get accused of a Kent bias in this blog (totally unfounded, of course, as a Man of Kent I’d have an East Kent bias) – Dungeness is bound to feature, biased or not, as the aftermath of the public inquiry decision plays out.
Staying in Kent – Lodge Hill’s nightingales will be returning in a April and they will have absolutely no idea that their summer home is now confirmed as a Site of Special Scientific Interest – the threat of housing development to the site hasn’t gone away but the SSSI status now levels the playing field.
To the north of Scotland and the vast, yet fragile, peatlands of Caithness and Sutherland – the Flow Country are at risk. The latest in a long line of badly conceived wind energy projects is at the centre of a campaign to protect this wild land and its inhabitants. Strathy South will be a major priority for RSPB Scotland during 2014.
The Gwent Levels in South Wales lie directly on the route of a proposed new motorway to increase the capacity of the M4 corridor, RSPB Cymru has joined with partner organisations to campaign against the damage this road could cause.
But this blog is not all about stopping bad things happening to our finest wildlife sites – the blog has been featuring stories from around our network of landscape-scale projects that make up our Futurescapes programme.
Given that we have appointed a curlew as guest editor of this blog (no, really) I’ll leave you with a link to one of our Futurescapes – Morecambe Bay – that just happens to be internationally important for the curved beak one.
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