Kent and Medway’s vision for nature recovery
The Kent and Medway Nature Recovery Strategy has 10 ambitions for nature recovery around which our more detailed priorities and potential measures are structured. The first three expand further on the overarching principles, expressing outcomes for connectivity, nature-based solutions, and land management and land use.
Following these are six ambitions that focus on broad habitat groupings and our aspirations our grassland, successional, wooded, freshwater, urban and coastal ecosystems. The tenth ambition relates to the Strategy area’s priority species and their recovery.
- Connectivity – High-quality habitats are connected at both a county and local scale, providing more linked natural space for nature to thrive in and a landscape that wildlife can move through and adapt to change in.
- Nature-based solutions – Through safeguarding, management and restoration of the county’s ecosystems, we enhance our resilience to climate change, deliver environmental improvements, address health and societal inequalities, and promote wellbeing, while advancing nature recovery.
- Land management and land use – Land management and land use throughout Kent and Medway not only meets the economic and social needs of the county but also delivers nature recovery gains.
- Grasslands – Our existing grasslands are conserved, with appropriate management returned, to restore, connect and extend these habitats to deliver high-quality, species-rich areas across the county.
- Successional habitats – The structural diversity of open mosaic (brownfield) habitat found on previously developed land and low-level scrub is safeguarded from loss and damage, for the benefit of species that rely on early successional habitats.
- Woodland, trees and hedgerows – Kent and Medway’s native woodland, trees and hedgerows are safeguarded from loss and under appropriate and active management, delivering robust ground flora and soil structures. A mixture of natural regeneration and new establishment improves connectivity and provides an even greater contribution to climate change mitigation and resilience.
- Freshwater – Our freshwater habitats are clean, sufficient and stable, in a healthy and good ecological state that supports an abundance and diversity of species. Catchments’ functions are restored to deliver a connected mosaic of wet habitats, improving water quality and managing flood risk across the county.
- Urban – Nature plays a central role in shaping the county’s built-up environments, with wildlife benefiting from a network of connected green, blue and grey spaces, which also provide nature-based solutions to the environmental challenges of urban areas.
- Coast – Coastal and estuarine areas are allowed to evolve, with natural processes and progression restored, to enable them to adapt and be resilient to climate change. Habitat succession is managed strategically and holistically, to minimise loss and support a range of high-functioning, connected coastal habitats.
- Species – Habitat management, restoration, extension or creation is specifically targeted to halt the decline, and support the recovery, of the Strategy’s priority and threatened species and in doing so, reduces the risk of losing species through extinction from the county.
