LAST month, I joined leaders from Bath & North East Somerset, Bristol, North Somerset, and South Gloucestershire councils to share a simple message about our region’s future: Together, we will back nature.
Because nature does not constrain our region’s growth – it’s among the many things driving it.
We made this commitment at the Wild Summit, the UK’s new flagship conference for nature, which was hosted here in the West of England, with the support of the CEOs of Triodos Bank UK and the national charity Wildlife and Countryside Link.
This came ahead of the launch of our regional Growth Strategy, which will happen just after your local Voice newspaper is published.
As we turn the page in the West, this is a smart investment in the prosperity, resilience, and well-being of communities across our area for years to come.
We can, and do, prioritise both nature and economic growth as the natural home of green jobs. We know that environmental investment brings an economic return and a social one: greener, healthier places for everyone to live and work, where we can all see and feel the benefits of nature.
The West’s iconic landscapes are rightly a real source of local pride for all of those who call our part of the world home. From the Severn Estuary to the Avon Gorge, from the Mendips to the Cotswolds, our natural world is also another unique selling point for us in a competitive national and global economy.
A shared commitment to nature recovery across the West recognises that re-connected and thriving natural systems underpin better quality of life, places to live and work, productivity, public health, and climate resilience. We will continue working with local communities to improve people’s neighbourhoods and livelihoods, with the opportunity to access nature in a way that works for you.
Our regional Local Nature Recovery Strategy, the first of its kind in the country, brings people together under a coordinated plan to restore and re-connect nature, and helps integrate nature recovery into housing, transport, and infrastructure planning.
This approach can reduce costs, risks, and delays by designing with nature from the outset, including around flood risk prevention/reduction through investment involving nature-based solutions, like the new wetlands in north Bristol and South Gloucestershire.
The West already has a strong track record in nature recovery. We have good foundations from which to build.
Together, the regional authority, councils, and partners across Bath & North East Somerset, Bristol, North Somerset, and South Gloucestershire have restored over 850 hectares of habitat, planted more than 230,000 trees, and improved at least 28 miles of rivers over recent years.
Our region has also emerged as a national hub for nature-based innovation, with leading expertise in green finance, alongside our world-class creative industries, including natural history broadcasting.
This announcement sets a clear course for a region where economic growth alongside care for our natural environment will deliver for people, places, and planet – not just now but long into the future.