NWWT Strategy 2030 Bringing Nature Back

We know that if nature is to be restored at scale, we need many more people on nature’s side – and North Wales Wildlife Trust, embedded in local communities, can be an effective and inspirational facilitator for change.

North Wales Wildlife Trust has a dedicated network of committed volunteers who are crucial to our work. We will continue to embrace the activity they do while widening our scope to the many people within our communities trying to mobilise in a different way for a better world for nature.

We commit ourselves to re-imagining volunteering and community action; to becoming more open and inclusive; and to being led by our supporters.

We will need to broaden our skills beyond being volunteer managers and work more as community facilitators: enabling, inspiring, and catalysing a new cohort of community organisers and campaigners. 

The rapid advancement of digital technologies in recent years presents unprecedented opportunities to increase the impact of our work; to adopt innovative approaches to new and existing challenges; and to broaden and enhance our engagement. These advances have revolutionised the very nature of ‘community’, and the way in which people connect, organise and mobilise to bring about change is continuously evolving.

To deliver our strategy and build our resilience to a changing external digital landscape, we will need to transform our existing digital systems and infrastructure, and increase the capability of North Wales Wildlife Trust to store and handle data.  This will require training to develop the digital skills and capabilities of our staff and volunteers; as well as addressing emerging risks in areas such as data ethics, access, protection and rights, and information security.

The complexity and scope of achieving our vision is greater now than it has ever been, both because of the scale and urgency of the climate and ecological emergency, and its relevance to peoples’ lives and livelihoods. Delivering our strategy will therefore require a step change in scale and diversity of the funding available for nature’s recovery.

North Wales Wildlife Trust exists thanks to the strong funding base provided by our loyal members, now numbering over 9,000. This has been built up steadily through our local fundraising and marketing an approach that will always be key to our strength and distinctiveness.

However, expanding other potential sources of unrestricted income must also be a priority.  We will need to explore new partnerships and business models, new ways of working and alternate sources of capital and financing – all while protecting our independence and integrity.

North Wales Wildlife Trust directly manages a fraction of the land which is needed to support nature’s recovery.    Our area covers 615,100h Ha – but we manage only 790 Ha (0.13%).   Meanwhile, approximately 82% of the land of Wales is classified as agricultural land, meaning that nature’s recovery can only be achieved via a step change in our influence on how farmland is managed.

To deliver our strategy, we will need to engage with a wider and more diverse range of partners and actors within our communities and across administrative borders, embracing collaborative multi-stakeholder approaches to address common causes and achieve greater impact.  This will mean opening ourselves up to more connections and transformative partnerships that prioritise collective action and joint problem-solving, including those outside the traditional, mainstream conservation sector.

There is an ever-increasing need to build the resilience of the marine ecosystem in Wales through habitat restoration, maximising carbon sequestration and completing an ecologically coherent and well-managed network of Marine Protected Areas.

Demands on our seas for resources and energy are increasing, and North Wales has been identified as a key area for many offshore renewable projects. However, most present and proposed devices are located in biodiversity hotspots – including the nutrient-rich waters that attract many of the top predators which Wales is proud to support.

To deliver our strategy we must ensure that our seas are managed to recover from past damage, disturbance and neglect and ensure that future impact of development at sea is minimised. To do so we must proactively prioritise engaging with and influencing developers, policy makers and communities from early stages of project development. 

North Wales Wildlife Trust is a corporate member of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts (RSWT): a registered charity in its own right, founded in 1912, and one of the founding members of IUCN – the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. 

There are 46 individual Wildlife Trusts across the UK and Crown Dependencies, each of which is a place-based independent charity with its own legal identity, formed by groups of people getting together and working with others to make a positive difference to wildlife and future generations, starting where they live and work.

Taken together, this federation of 47 charities is known as The Wildlife Trusts.