Defining our priorities for nature

The starting point for the development of the Kent and Medway Local Nature Recovery Strategy was to determine the key issues it needed to consider when setting priorities for nature recovery – what the Strategy should be responding to and the actions needed to address them. At a series of workshops, stakeholders identified pressures, threats and challenges facing the county’s biodiversity both now and anticipated in the future.

At the same time as determining the pressures and challenges for the county, stakeholders also outlined the outcomes they would like to see for nature – what a county with recovered habitats and restored species populations would look like. This created the initial longlist of potential priorities.

Criteria to aid the prioritisation of this longlist was developed, with input from stakeholders to ensure it was a fair and equitable selection process. Refinement against the criteria selected priorities that:

• were within the scope of the Local Nature Recovery Strategy remit and ability to affect
• addressed key pressures and challenges
• related to habitats and/or species of national or local significance
• contributed to national targets and/or supported local targets (as identified by the review of national and local strategies and plans – see Part 2, Chapter 6 for further details)
• were urgent, related to climate change vulnerability and/or presented opportunity for nature-based solutions

Further workshops were held to review the draft priorities. Although this did not lead to any further refinement, it did confirm that the priorities provided the right focus for nature recovery in the county.