How can our environment adapt to climate change?

If the climate continues to change as expected, there is a real risk that our fragile and embattled natural ecosystems will fail to cope.  Wildlife will need space to allow it to respond and adapt.  It will need the best natural areas to be protected and looked after better than they have been in the past; it will need wild land to be encouraged and even recreated where it is scarce; it will need virtually everywhere to be managed in ways that are friendlier to wildlife and enable the free movement of plants and animals across the length and breadth of the country.  It will need people to think big.

This is at the heart of the Wildlife Trusts’ vision of a Living Landscape.  Landscape scale conservation that reconnects habitats and works with nature to provide the essential ecosystem services that we all depend on for life.

Within the Sheffield and Rotherham area the Wildlife Trust has identified 5 key Living Landscape areas on which action will be focused: 

1)  The River Don;

2)  The South Sheffield Greenway (Blacka Moor to Orgreave - including the Porter Valley, Gleadless Valley, Moss Valley, Shirebrook Valley and Rother Valley);

3)  The West Sheffield Valleys (Loxley & Rivelin);

4)  The Pennine Moors (the moorlands to the West of Sheffield, heading South into Derbyshire and North into Barnsley);

5)  The M1 Woodland Corridor (from Meadowhall heading North).

Within these Living Landscapes we are striving to strengthen existing connections and to create new ones:

between people and nature;

between town & country;

between populations of otherwise isolated plants & animals;

between patches of fragmented natural habitat;

between the physical structure of the landscape and its ecological function;

between the natural environment and public health & wellbeing;

between the natural environment and society's wealth & prosperity.

To deliver this vision we will need to increase our level of activity and engage a wide variety of partners.  Work will include practical land management and working with partners to influence their management of greenspace.  Survey, monitoring, research and planning - to identify where existing wildlife is and how people use the landscapes, to document and analyse this and feed it back into action and influencing work.  Provision of advice & guidance to developers, planners, land owners and managers within the landscapes to bring about more connections and higher quality.  Embedding the Living Landscapes and their associated priority sites and projects into Local Biodiversity Action Plans, Local Development Frameworks, Green & Open Space Strategies, etc. and delivery of programmes of business & community engagement, development, education & training to enable beneficial interaction between people and their Living Landscapes.