Our business is the natural world...

Here at your Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside our vision is that nature is recovering across our whole area, and in our sea, and we want to everyone to be able to enjoy increasingly abundant wildlife.

That’s not just about rare species, it’s about common things too. We passionately believe in the value of wildlife for its own sake, but also for the value it brings to us: the colour, beauty, wonder, health and wellbeing. Its something we feel everyone has a right to enjoy, no matter what their background or where they live.

Firstly, we have to conserve, restore, create and connect the habitats where our wildlife lives. We want 30 per cent of our land and sea in nature recovery by 2030: a Wildlife Trusts target which has now been adopted as the international target following the 2022 UN COP15 Convention on Biological Diversity.

Despite all we have done over the last 60 years we know wildlife is under threat where we live and across the world. We must work together with you, our supporters, with businesses, schools, community groups, funders, policy makers, planners, local authorities, government agencies, landowners, farmers, anglers and other charities, to fightfor a better and wilder future.

Just how we do this is set out in our Business Plan, and our performance against it is described in our annual report (the next one is due out in Autumn).

Of course establishing and looking after nature reserves will always be at the heart of what we do, but our wonderful nature reserves cover only 0.2 per cent of our land area; so we can only meet this goal by working with others: helping, advising, supporting and enabling change.

It is why we work as managing agents for local authorities like Wigan Council or Fylde Council on special places like the Flashes of Wigan and Leigh National Nature Reserve or the Fylde sand dunes.

You can find out more about the business plan at www.lancswt. org.uk

It is why we work with local farmers to demonstrate and support wetter farming trials on our peatland landscapes across our region, or to develop pollinator-rich field margins and roadside verges in East Lancashire and the West Pennines.

It is why we have a team who go into schools to help them to develop nature gardens and wild areas in their (play)grounds. It is why we are engaged with the county Local Nature Recovery Strategies, and the planning system, to ensure habitats and projects are connected so wildlife can move through the landscape (increasingly important in a rapidly changing climate).

Secondly, positive long-term change will only happen if we facilitate a culture and a society in which looking after nature is something that everyone does as standard in their daily lives. Whilst there are some positive changes coming within the corporate sector having to better document, understand, and improve their impacts on the natural world; really this is about people power.

We use a target of “1 in 4 people taking meaningful actions for nature in their daily lives” because social scientific evidence estimates that if 25 per cent of people do something it creates a tipping point where everyone benefits - think the way that the whole of society embraced smoking-free public spaces, wearing seatbelts, recycling, or moving away from plastic bags.

It could mean wildlife gardening, buying sustainably-harvested seafood, getting involved in a rewilding project, writing to a local MP asking them to support improvements to our natural world, volunteering in your local park; encouraging your housing association to manage its green space better for wildflowers and insects, or taking part in No Mow May.

It means we need to continue to invest in our fabulous education, wellbeing and communications teams, and in our conservation officers who all do such a wonderful job inspiring, enabling and supporting other people so that all of us know the most impactful things we can be doing that make the most difference. To paraphrase Sir David Attenborough, we need to give people the experiences that make them care about nature, to inspire them to protect it.

Finally, the third part of our strategy is that all the above is dependent on a thriving and well-resourced Wildlife Trust. To enable us to be as good as we can be we need to build our financial resilience, especially our “unrestricted” income, to invest in the skills and training and knowledge of our staff and volunteers, to develop the most effective and efficient systems, the best data, mapping and IT.