Farmers and landowners will receive funding and support for projects to protect and restore thousands of acres of the English landscape. The aim is to create new habitats for wildlife, help protected sites and boost efforts to reach net zero, alongside sustainable food production.
Building on the success of the first round of the scheme launched last year, farmers and land managers are able to bid for a share of £15 million initial development funding, with significantly more investment in the years to come as projects move from development to delivery.
This will help them to collaborate and work in partnership to protect and enhance landscapes in England, delivering environmental benefits on a massive scale while supporting farmers to deliver their world-renowned produce.
The second round of the scheme will support up to 25 projects which will be administered by Natural England and the Environment Agency – the lead delivery partners for the scheme. The projects will be selected based on their environmental and social impact, value for money and suitability for the scheme. In addition, for the first time, a food production criterion has been introduced which will be used to ensure prospective projects take food production into consideration and mitigate any negative impacts on this where possible.
It will focus on projects of at least 500 hectares which could include landscape scale projects creating and enhancing woodland including temperate rainforest, peatland, nature reserves and protected sites such as ancient woodlands, wetlands and salt marshes.
First round successes
This new round builds on the success of the first round of the scheme last year, which was oversubscribed with high quality applications. The 22 projects selected for the first round focus on recovering and restoring England’s threatened native species and restoring England’s streams and rivers by improving water quality, enhancing biodiversity and adapting to climate change.
Farmers and land managers, including tenants and upland farmers, are at the centre of all the projects. They will be working closely together to deliver a range of environmental benefits across farmland and rural landscapes. This includes creating and enhancing habitats from chalk streams and temperate rainforest to moorland and wetland, restoring over 600km of rivers, and protecting at least 263 species such as water vole, otter, pine marten, lapwing, great crested newt, European eel and marsh fritillary.
The projects range from the Three Dales project in Yorkshire – where a consortium of ten farmers, landowners and conservation organisations led by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust are aiming to restore a large area of the western Yorkshire Dales uplands, creating habitats for species including black grouse, curlew and ring ouzels – to the Darent Valley Farmer Cluster in Kent which is seeing farmers join forces with Kent Wildlife Trust and more local organisations to carry out chalk stream restoration in the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
The Landscape Recovery Programme
The Landscape Recovery programme is one of the government’s three new Environmental Land Management schemes, alongside the Sustainable Farming Incentive and Countryside Stewardship. Funding is being provided from the government’s £2.4 billion annual investment into the farming sector, which is guaranteed for the rest of this Parliament, with every penny of the reductions to farmers’ direct payments reinvested back into farming.
Find out more on the GOV.UK website.