13th December 2020
A wooded landscape delivering the benefits, but due for the chop!! A blog from Ian Rotherham.
Jay (photo credit: Ian Rotherham)
I imagine that if I said there was an area of urban-fringe countryside which delivered the following, you would expect its future to be safe, secure, and even celebrated:
- UK Biodiversity targets – a local biodiversity hotspot for birds, badgers and other mammals, and for invertebrates such as butterflies, bumblebees, hoverflies, and more…
- Floodwater mitigation and sustainable drainage targets – holding back the flow to sustain local watercourses and contributing to reducing flood-risk downstream
- Climate-change mitigation targets – the site is actively sequestrating carbon from the atmosphere to reduce greenhouse gas impacts – and this landscape provides resilience to adverse changes
- Health and wellbeing benefits to local people – the site surrounds a local health centre and is much loved and well-used by local citizens – it supports people’s mental and physical wellbeing – and important during COVID, has been freely available during LOCKDOWN
- Conservation targets and includes supposedly protected ancient woodland
- The ‘government’s Future Treescapes Strategy’ through safeguarding existing ancient woodland and through a spontaneous (natural) new woodland which has self-set on former farmland abandoned thirty years ago. This is now a dynamic and incredibly exciting habitat with diverse tree species, orchid-rich grassland, and extensive bramble scrub providing rich shelter and feeding for birds like bullfinches and long-tailed tits, for a wide range of butterflies, and yes, badgers, foxes and roe deer. Above all though, it is growing a huge number of new trees for the future. It is quite literally, buzzing with nature…..
- It is helping to address Sheffield City Council’s stated aim to deal with the ‘climate change crisis’ and the climate emergency….
