For a number of years, Professor Sir John Lawton has been on the road with a slideshow about how to provide more space for nature through landscape scale conservation. As the champion for more, bigger, better and connected protected areas, he often showed this slide (below) comparing the size of conservation projects and the level of management required in the UK with others around the world. In his own inimitable style, he encouraged us to deliver a step change in thinking and practice.
After the launch of the Endangered Landscapes Programme last night I am delighted that John can now add new blue blobs towards the bottom right of his graph.
At the event, Sir John introduced eight projects across Europe which will benefit from the new $30m grant programme funded by Arcadia (a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin) and managed by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative.
One of the projects receiving a grant is led by the RSPB: Cairngorms Connect. My colleague Jeremy Roberts gave an excellent overview of the project which includes the RSPB's Abernethy reserve (pictured below) but also covers our neighbours and partners from Wildland Limited, Forest Enterprise Scotland and Scottish Natural Heritage. As I wrote after my last visit, it is a massive project which will make a contribution to meeting our bold and ambitious 200-year vision to enhance habitats (such as Caledonian pinewood), 5,000 species (including capercaillie and 11 raptor species) and ecological processes across 600 square kilometres, within the Cairngorms National Park.
The RSPB will also contribute to the Summit to Sea project in mid-Wales led by Rewilding Britain with the Woodland Trust. These British projects sit alongside those in Turkey, Portugal, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus and in Georgia (the latter being led by BirdLife International). All will benefit nature and people with new new models for sustainable finance being explored.
The timing couldn't be better.
As we approach the date when world leaders need to agree new ambition to restore biodiversity, there is growing acceptance that globally we need to dramatically increase the area of land and sea protected or restored to prevent mass extinctions.
Thanks to the Endangered Landscapes Programme, not only will Sir John get more blue blobs for his graph but these project will also set the standard for how to deliver more, bigger, better areas for nature across Europe.
David Tomlinson's photo of Abernethy (rspb-images.com)
That is really good news as all this is so important. As regards the Cairngorms Connect project is has been very interesting reading Isobel Trees book “Wilding” about the Wilding of the Knepp estate in Sussex. In the book she demolishes many of the misleading statements made by intensive farming industry and supporters but she also spends time on setting out the latest evidence that the prehistoric UK may not have had high canopy forest all over the country. She and her ecologists put the case that it is far more likely that the country consisted of open grazed areas by hebivours, with much wood pasture but only some closed canopy forest taking a lesser proportion of the land. Looking at the picture of Abernethy on this blog I would say it fits her description very well.
Good stuff. I was at the start of Summit to Sea ensuring as many different voices were in the room right from the start. The important of co-ownership from bottom-up, local communities, including land managers, farmers etc, cannot be underestimated when a coalition of freethinking humans has so much to offer in the way of hope for ourselves and nature in this remote and marginal area. Onwards!
ps Sir John Lawton very keen on the land-share slide, part also of the success around farmer clusters robyorke.co.uk/.../together-for-wildlife