Local Nature Recovery Strategies (LNRS) are a new, England-wide system of spatial strategies that will establish priorities and map proposals for specific actions to drive nature’s recovery and provide wider environmental benefits. The requirement for there to be Local Nature Recovery Strategies, what they are and how they should generally work are established by the Environment Act.
Work is now underway to produce the Oxfordshire Local Nature Recovery Strategy, led by Oxfordshire County Council. The strategy will create a written list and a map to highlight areas of land that are particularly important for biodiversity across the county. Whilst Oxfordshire County Council is ‘responsible’ for the preparation and publication of the strategy, the Council is not creating this strategy in isolation from other organisations. Quite the opposite, the LNRS set up a partnership of organisations who work in groups to oversee the decision-making, creation, and development of this strategy.
This decision-making process will be influenced by the priorities collected from people across our county, which will then be linked to potential actions people across Oxfordshire can take in those areas. Wild Oxfordshire chair the Engagement and Communications Working Group, sit on the Steering Group, and contribute to the Data & Evidence Group for the LNRS.
January 2025 - Consultation response to the draft strategy
The response from people and organisations across Oxfordshire was impressive, with over 2,100 responses received during this time which clearly demonstrates the drive and ambition that local people have to improve the state of nature in Oxfordshire. The response rate to this consultation was about 3-4 times higher than previous response rates to consultation opportunities of this type. The LNRS team received emails, online submissions, maps of local areas, and comments on our interactive map tool. Many comments asked about including additional areas or modifying boundaries to better-represent local opportunities and local knowledge. Oxfordshire’s Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery are working with the LNRS to bring these responses together and to create a public report that the LNRS team will share online in the coming months. This report will be used by the LNRS team to make changes to the drafted priorities, suggested actions, and mapped areas before we publish the final version of Oxfordshire's LNRS and enables us to be transparent about what we heard during the consultation. The LNRS team will then prepare responses that show ‘what we did’ in response to ‘what you said’.
What does this mean for the project timeline?
Since significantly more responses were received than anticipated, the Council and project partners have agreed for the LNRS team to take additional time to publish the final LNRS with the intention to produce a final LNRS for Oxfordshire by Autumn 2025. All of the LNRS team and partners want to get the final version of the strategy published as soon as possible to help add more momentum to local people and organisations to deliver actions to benefit nature. However, we do not wish to miss important responses that we received during the consultation and since we received so many responses, it was felt that this additional time would allow the LNRS team to appropriately respect the consultation process, and to have enough time to build these responses into our final version of the strategy to better reflect local ambition and knowledge.
December 2024 to February 2025 - The third and final phase of the LNRS consultation has been completed, and the Oxfordshire County Council are in the process of analysis the responses to feed into the final strategy.The final phase of the consultation invited the public to review and comment on documents that list biodiversity priorities to achieve in the county, a list of species to focus recovery efforts on, and a map tool which shows the areas where the LNRS is recommending that local people and organisations focus their resources to undertake habitat creation and improvement work. You can view the draft LNRS on Oxfordshire County Council's website.
May 2024 - Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Oxfordshire’s Local Nature Recovery Strategy through meetings, workshops, and the online survey. We really appreciate your time and effort and we are working hard to analyse the results so they can be included in the next stage of developing the LNRS. The online webinar held on 8th May discussed more detail about our progress through Phase 2 of the process and consultation. You can watch this below.
The NRS will need to based on sound science and a strong local evidence base. The NRS will be action-focussed, and will need to identify areas where activities can be undertaken to support the ambition of the nature recovery strategy. Thames Valley Environmental Records Centre (TVERC) will lead on this area of work, helping to compile all baseline data, any modelling (e.g., natural capital or climate change), and opportunity maps.
Wild Oxfordshire are an active member of the Data & Evidence Working Group for the LNRS.
We already have some excellent baseline evidence data which put Oxfordshire in a great position to start work on the NRS. The baseline evidence base we have includes:
Oxfordshire State of Nature – This report is a comprehensive review of Oxfordshire’s Wildlife and provides vital baseline data. Over 60 species experts and over 40 environmental organisations contributed data sets and volunteer hours into the report, which highlights the natural jewels in Oxfordshire’s crown and considers what is currently being done, and what could be done better in future.
The report was led by Wild Oxfordshire, supported by RSPB, BBOWT, Oxfordshire County Council, CPRE, Environment Agency, Natural England, and Banbury Ornithological Society.
Oxfordshire (draft) Nature Recovery Network – This is map which shows where we need to focus our efforts, and some high-level policies which would help achieve nature’s recovery. It will form the spatial element of the Nature Recovery Strategy (‘local habitat map’ in Defra terminology). This was formally submitted to the OP2050 consultation in August 2019 to ensure that nature is taken into account in development plans in Oxfordshire. This work was delivered by TVERC, Wild Oxfordshire and the Berks Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust.
In addition to the State of Nature and draft Nature Recovery Network, Healthy ecosystems restoration in Oxfordshire (HERO) is working on collating background information which will help create and inform the Strategy. HERO is led by the University of Oxford, with guidance from Wild Oxfordshire, BBOWT and TOE.
The three Protected Landscapes in Oxfordshire (Cotswolds, Chilterns and North Wessex Downs) will all have Nature Recovery Plans, as do the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust and Catchment Partnerships which will need to be considered and engaged with (although they will be based on the same data which the draft Oxfordshire NRN was based on).
Essential to meeting the ambitions of the NRS will be funding to ensure delivery of nature’s recovery on the ground.
Oxfordshire's Local Nature Partnership is seeking to leverage private money to fund high-integrity nature recovery and nature-based solutions. Nature is valuable in its own right - and we also rely on it for our own survival. But it is in decline, and we know that there is currently insufficient funding available to support its recovery – the national deficit is estimated to be in the region of £56 billion by 2030, and the Oxfordshire figure is estimated at over £800 million. At the same time, businesses increasingly want and need to fund nature projects, whether through voluntary or mandatory markets. We are working as part of the LNP to develop a delivery framework for natural capital investment in Oxfordshire that has real integrity. This includes developing and supporting a pipeline of projects that can be invested in to enhance ecosystem service provision in the county.
Trust for Oxfordshire's Environment are Oxfordshire’s independent environmental funder. Their Local Environment Fund raises money and allocates grants for local projects that benefit wildlife and promote access to green spaces. They work with developers and landowners to administer Biodiversity Net Gain funds, ensuring that responsible development results in more biodiversity in our county, not less. TOE acts as both fundraiser and grant maker. This makes it easy for a wide range of donors to connect with many of the best local projects in need of financial support.
The Environment Bill mandates that the responsibility for producing the LNRS falls to Oxfordshire County Council. We are working very closely with OCC on the creation of the LNRS, and are encouraging all those involved to consider how the LNRS will include everyone, deliver nature recovery on the ground, and be effectively monitored.
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