Farming with Nature 2021 event report

Abstract

University of Cumbria’s Centre for National Parks and Protected Areas (CNPPA) hosted the online conference Farming with Nature in May 2021, with support from the Food, Farming & Countryside Commission. The event set out to explore two of the recommendations from Defra’s 2019 Landscapes Review, these being: (i) that our national landscapes should form the backbone of nature recovery networks and, (ii) that national landscapes should have a central place in forthcoming Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes. Contributions by guest speakers and the active participation of all attendees at the conference workshops provided substantial insight into the opportunities and challenges ahead. Attendees, mainly from a spread of geographical regions in England, held a range of job roles relevant to land management in protected landscapes. In the report, rich qualitative data arising from the conference sessions is analysed. Actions to facilitate ELM and to develop nature recovery networks in farmed landscapes are identified. Recordings of the conference sessions are available on the @CNPPA_UoC YouTube channel at https://bit.ly/3r4NHb