Find out more about a landscape-scale projects Nature After Minerals helped convene and coordinate.

Trent and Thame Futurescape

NAM helped convene and coordinate a landscape-scale project to maximise biodiversity gain from a number of quarrying sites along the valleys of the rivers Trent and Thame. In 2015 and 2016 there were six Mineral Local Plans (MLPs) covering the area – Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire – all being reviewed over a similar timeframe.

This offered an opportunity to develop minerals planning policies that promoted the strategic, co-ordinated and landscape-scale approach consistently across county boundaries. This, in turn, helped to establish a coherent and resilient network of wetlands across the whole of the Trent and Tame River Valleys.

OxCam Arc

To close a "missing link" in the strategic road network, the Government has proposed a new major road – an Expressway – to reduce journey times between Oxford and Cambridge and to enable development of up to a million new homes across the corridor.

This huge scale of development, in an already crowded part of England, will require careful planning so as to achieve a net gain for wildlife whilst delivering such a huge infrastructure project. The project will also require a huge amounts of aggregates to deliver the roads, homes, schools and offices that this increased population will require. Extracting minerals from the best locations, and delivering excellent and joined-up restorations will play a huge part in the project leaving a positive legacy for wildlife.

Landscape scale advisory sheets

Landscape scale conservation

Over the past decade, there has been an increasing push from the environmental sector for a stepwise change in how we conserve our natural environment, moving from site-specific silo-thinking to a larger-scale, multi-site, multi-partnered approach.