The Endangered Landscapes Programme (ELP) is delighted to announce the publication of its new strategy, which provides direction and focus for its vision to restore landscapes across Europe, for the benefit of nature and people. This strategy lays out a pathway for the programme to reach ambitious goals to 2030, the same timetable for many global level agreements for tackling biodiversity loss and reaching climate targets. These include the Sustainable Development Goals, the UN post-2020 biodiversity framework expected to be adopted at the UN Biodiversity Conference in Kunming later this year, and – most notably for the ELP – the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
The ELP is managed by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative(CCI), a partnership between the University of Cambridge and nine biodiversity conservation organisations, and the new strategy is a result of the collaborative nature of this partnership. Dr Mike Maunder, Executive Director of CCI says:
“This is a pivotal time for nature. The next eight years (2022 – 2030) are critical for delivering the targets of international environmental frameworks and reversing biodiversity loss in Europe and beyond. The Endangered Landscapes Programme’s new strategy presents an ambitious and positive agenda, that forms part of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative’s strategic priority on ‘restoring land and seascapes for life’.”
Since 2018, the ELP has supported projects across Europe that are restoring some of the region’s most important landscapes on a huge scale – collectively restoring ecosystem processes across nearly 1.5 million hectares of land and sea. They are bringing back biodiversity, sometimes reintroducing species which have been missing for hundreds of years. They are helping wildlife and people adapt to climate change, and contributing to climate mitigation through peatland, seagrass and forest restoration. And alongside this, they are creating new economic opportunities from which people in these landscapes can benefit.
To see what this looks like in practice, take a look at our new 4-minute programme video, which describes just some of the fantastic achievements of our funded projects so far and reiterates our ambition as a programme:
The new strategy shows how the programme links science, policy and practice, supporting
organisations to deliver successful landscape restoration across Europe by:
- Funding landscape restoration through the provision of grants
- Strengthening capacity and capability for landscape scale restoration
- Advancing and applying knowledge to inform and strengthen delivery of restoration
- Convening key stakeholders to work together to create the conditions for landscape restoration
- Inspiring action by communicating stories of hope and engaging people through the arts
The ELP also monitors its impact, and its contribution to the delivery of global targets including the Sustainable Development Goals, Convention on Biological Diversity, and UNFCCC, using a Programme Results Framework. The status of these key indicators will be reported regularly in our Annual Review (due for publication later this year).
We are grateful as ever for the generous support of Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, that makes our work possible, and it is our pleasure to share this new strategy and programme video with you, as we work to ‘restore landscapes for life’.
Read the strategy in full:
With thanks to Matt Willatt (www.mattwillatt.co.uk) for the design of the Strategy, 2022 – 2030 document, and Alexander Parkyn-Smith (www.alexanderparkynsmith.com) for production of the new ELP film.
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