Why ‘Natural Areas’?

I created my Natural Areas blog on Wordpress a few years ago to showcase the concept of creating large, more natural landscapes within which wild nature can re-assemble and thrive.

Although I have the UK in my mind’s eye when writing about this concept, it’s applicable to any region that’s been subject to large-scale habitat loss.

Roughly speaking, clusters of land owners and managers - farmers, reserve owners, public land owners, businesses - would pull their land-holdings together to create a landscape within which recovery of wilder nature is a key objective.

Such an approach is already been pioneered with great success by farmers in ‘Farm Clusters’, where groups if neighbouring farmers work together to recover nature and achieve nature-friendly farming practices.

Farm Clusters in England are well-supported by the public through agri-environment schemes. These schemes support habitat protection, creation and management within actively farmed holdings.

In England, Defra is edging towards supporting a Natural Areas approach through its Landscape Recovery scheme within the post-CAP Environmental Land Management (ELM) package of farmer support.

Translating this clustering approach of Farm Clusters to creation of Natural Areas is the focus of my Natural Areas blog that now sits on this website.