Natural Capital: Natural Capital is a term used to refer to the stock of natural resources, which can be renewable or not. Natural capital assets include plants, animals, air, soil, water and minerals, all of which combine in ways that benefit people.
Ecosystem Services: These services are directly linked to natural capital assets. There are the many and varied benefits humans gain from the natural environment. Examples of ecosystem services include crop pollination, clean air, natural flood protection and recreation.
Landscape Scale: This approach to conservation and land management, also known as the Ecosystem Approach, involves working in collaboration at a large-scale. Often around a catchment, estuary or other recognisable landscape unit.
Integrated Local Delivery (ILD): This is a new approach to delivering environmental goals, which puts an emphasis on working at a local level, working from the ground up.
Farmer Cluster: This concept was developed by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (Curlew Country’s Host Partner) and involves many farms working together to set and achieve environmental goals across a landscape scale rather than at a single farm level. Each group has a lead farmer and chooses a facilitator to assist in choosing targets and recording progress.
Facilitation Fund: This is a fund available from the government in order to progress the concept of farmer clusters. The funding can be applied for by groups to pay for a facilitator and training, in order to achieve landscape scale goals across their holdings.
Whole Farm Plans: A plan which identifies different land features and characteristics including existing use and natural and cultural heritage. It should also establish what you cherish and why, what you want to do with it and why, and the positive outcomes of doing this. It can help to provide clarity and understanding, as well as clearly defining goals and outcomes for a farm and its links to the wider landscape.
Corporate/Carbon Offsetting: These are schemes which allow individuals or companies to invest in environmental projects in order to balance their own carbon footprints.
Biodiversity Net Gain: This is an approach to development which aims to leave biodiversity in a better state than before. If a development impacts directly on biodiversity, it encourages mitigation to create or restore similar habitat to that which is lost. Proposals to make biodiversity net gain mandated under the new environmental bill are currently under consideration.
Habitat Banks: Habitat banks are proposed as 40-100ha areas dedicated to biodiversity restoration. The idea behind them being that the environmental benefits can then be purchased by planners and developers, as conservation credits, in order to meet biodiversity net gain targets.
Conservation Credits: Conservation credits are a way of quantifying the value of habitat banks and can be purchased by developers in an area to meet biodiversity net gain targets. The conservation credits generated by a habitat bank can serve multiple developments within an area.
Biodiversity Units: Biodiversity units are a way of expressing the value of a habitat, and are calculated based on 3 criteria: distinctiveness, quality and area (in hectares).
ELMS: This is the acronym used for the Environmental Land Management Scheme. It is still in the development phase and is expected to replace the current schemes under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 2024. The scheme aims to pay farmers for environmental services, using the natural capital model to calculate value.
Rewilding: Rewilding is a large-scale ecosystem restoration approach, which aims to restore natural processes and, in some cases, missing species to allow the nature within to take care of itself. It aims to implement long-term benefits for nature, without human imposed end states, and can create new opportunities for nature-based economies.
Agroforestry: This is where trees and agricultural or horticultural crops are grown on the same piece of land, supplying multiple products as well as providing other environmental benefits, such as flood protection, soil fertility, and pest protection.
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