Annex 1
SCOPE OF
NATURAL ENGLAND'S
CLIMATE CHANGE
POLICY
1. The scope of Natural England's policy
on climate change is focused on two areas:
— developing and implementing
adaptation strategies that will help the natural environment to
be able to withstand the impacts of unavoidable climate change;
and
— contributing to the mitigation
of greenhouse gas pollution through land management practices
and Natural England's own operations.
2. Natural England will seek to be a recognised
leader in climate change adaptation and a major contributor to
mitigation.
3. Natural England's focus on adaptation
will be to increase the resilience, therefore reducing the vulnerability,
of the natural environment to unavoidable climate change based
on the following key principles:
— continuing to conserve existing
biodiversity, particularly on protected sites;
— adopting a landscape-scale approach
to conservation management in which protected sites are the building
blocks;
— reducing habitat fragmentation
by increasing landscape connectivity and building resilient natural
systems, so that wildlife is more able to withstand changing climatic
conditions; and
— demonstrating what adaptation
for wildlife looks like and how it can be delivered through exemplar
projects and actions.
4. Natural England's mitigation work will
seek to enhance the role of the natural environment in helping
to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and will focus on three areas:
— supporting, through planning
processes, increased investment in clean energy technologies using
a risk based approach which balances any short term impacts on
the natural environment with the long term imperative to reduce
the threat of dangerous climate change;
— identifying and promoting the
contribution that land managers can make as `carbon managers',
by enhancing the ability of the natural environment to remove
(sequester) greenhouse gas pollution from the atmosphere and store
it in "carbon sinks"; and
— leading by example through the
target to halve Natural England's own greenhouse gas pollution
by 2010 through our choices about energy use, transport and carbon
off-sets.
5. Natural England will play a leading role
in marshalling the evidence on the potential impacts of climate
change on the natural environment in order to continue to build
the case for action. Work to develop Natural England's science
and evidence base will also be increasingly focused on developing
on-the-ground strategies and action to improve the resilience
of landscapes, ecosystems and species.
January 2007
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