5 minute read
Looking Ahead
Delivering our vision
Coulters Dean Nature Reserve © Paul Gonella
Next year will be the second year of our Wilder 2030 strategy. Although our first year was impacted by Covid-19, we made significant progress. We established two flagship programmes to focus our delivery: ‘Team Wilder’, to inspire 1 in 4 people to take action for wildlife and the environment, and ‘Wilder Land & Sea’ to secure 30% of our local area for nature’s recovery and reduce the pressure on nature everywhere else.
We will build on our success in 2020 and take advantage of the current political and public interest in the environmental agenda. 2021 is set to be a hugely important year for the environment with COP26 and the UN decade of nature restoration, and domestically with the Environment Bill, planning changes and new agricultural rules providing huge opportunities to turn the tide for nature.
We will grow our Team Wilder programme in the coming year. We are targeting our efforts within urban areas, aiming to reach more people as part of our “1 in 4” goal and encouraging the public to create wilder towns, cities and gardens.
We will continue to build momentum and profile for Wilder Portsmouth and campaign for better decision making in planning and coastal protection. We also aim to launch Wilder Southampton, Wilder Basingstoke and Wilder Wight. The Wildlife Trusts will be finalising and launching a new UK strategy and we will help establish a national roll-out of Team Wilder across the Wildlife Trust movement.
We will also continue to offer a broad programme of education and engagement, inspiring people of all ages to connect with nature and join our movement to create a Wilder Future. We will develop a youth engagement project to deepen nature connection and encourage environmental action in the younger generations. Our training programme for education professionals will continue with new courses in 2021.
We will continue to build our Wilder Champions and Leaders programme and will look to develop campaign and school leaders and provide new pathways for people to become involved with the Trust.
Within our Wilder Land & Sea programme we will continue to develop our work on nature-based solutions. We will continue to identify and acquire intensively managed farmland for restoration, especially arable farmland in the East Wight. By repairing and rewilding this land we will remove nitrate pollution, produce a net gain in biodiversity and carbon capture. We will continue to work with others to develop markets for these nature-based solutions to generate funding for nature’s recovery – making sure we uphold the highest ethical standards and ensure genuine gains for nature in the process.
One of our goals within Wilder 2030 is to double the Trust’s estate and create new nature reserves to protect wildlife, with an increasing focus on land for rewilding and habitat creation. We will target land that makes the greatest contribution to the nature recovery network, strengthens our own landholding and produces an increase in biodiversity. We are acquiring the Wight Nature Fund estate in Alverstone Mead, with areas of marsh, meadow and woodland transferred to the Trust. 2021 will see our Isle of Wight estate grow to 1,000 acres over 16 sites.
The pandemic saw an increased awareness of the importance of outdoor space, with more people visiting the countryside and Trust nature reserves than ever before. This gave an opportunity for more people to connect with nature and the Trust, but the downside is a huge increase in pressure on our sites and disturbance to wildlife. In the coming year we will improve the way we engage with our visitors and manage the impact of their visits. We will use behavioural science to influence the way people appreciate these valuable sites, and improve links with local communities.
Following an event to launch the idea of a Wilder Wight, we have seen interest in rewilding and the return of missing species increase across the Island. With our increased
Beaver © Darin Smith
landholdings in the Eastern Yar Valley we are now able to begin our beaver recovery programme. We have received initial funding to appoint a dedicated officer to begin a programme of consultation and engagement, beginning in summer 2021. The Rewilding Farmland Birds project, part of our Missing Species programme, will continue to develop, investigating the potential for chough and cirl bunting reintroductions, and the importance of high nature-value farming in supporting such species. We will develop both projects further in 2021 to form regional partnerships and to satisfy licensing requirements. We aim to publish a Wilder Wight strategy document as a platform to attract investment and funding, as well as support from the local MP, businesses, influencers, and decision makers.
Our advocacy work will focus on ensuring that nature’s recovery is at the heart of local planning, policy and practice. With the Environment Bill and other significant policy changes expected in 2021, we will play a key role in the development of Local Nature Recovery Strategies and the delivery of the Nature Recovery Network. We will also develop new paid-for services to help others deliver Biodiversity Net Gain and other nature-based solutions. We will continue to deliver the Watercress & Winterbournes project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF), working with communities to safeguard the headwaters of the Test and Itchen. We will also continue to deliver ecological monitoring and freshwater habitat restoration as part of Southern Water’s Section 20 contract.
We will deliver the penultimate year of the Secrets of the Solent project, also funded by the NLHF, continuing to engage people in new ways to grow appreciation of the marine environment. We look forward to the opening of the delayed marine litter sculpture and exhibition in Portsmouth Museum. As part of Natural England’s Recreation ReMEDIES project and a pilot project with Boskalis Westminster, we will monitor, protect and restore seagrass beds, focusing on the potential for their large-scale restoration and capture ‘blue carbon’ as a naturebased climate solution.
We will continue to invest in business resources, in particular the next phase of our IT project and the move to cloud-based systems to enable remote working. Other business improvements include a new finance system and new customer relationship management database, which will increase efficiency and minimise risk for the organisation. We will measure our carbon footprint and increase our focus on reaching net zero as quickly as possible, to fulfill our pledge to becoming a climate-positive organisation by 2030.
