A £30m step in the right direction

Last week the UK government confirmed a £30 million investment to restore wildlife-rich habitats across England's most treasured protected landscapes, from the uplands of Dartmoor to the rugged fells of the Lake District. Announced by Nature Minister Mary Creagh on 25 May, the new Wildlife-Rich Habitat Fund will provide £10 million a year between 2026 and 2029, reaching 36 of England's 44 National Parks, National Landscapes and the Broads in its first year. It is welcome and overdue recognition that the places people love most are also among those where nature has quietly been slipping away, with species such as the curlew, the turtle dove, the water vole and the hazel dormouse all in retreat as their habitats degrade.

Set against the scale of the national ambition, the fund is an important marker of intent. The government has committed to protecting 30 per cent of England's land for nature by 2030, and it is bound by a legal target under the Environment Act to restore more than 500,000 hectares of wildlife-rich habitat by 2042. Seen in that context, this announcement is best understood as the beginning of the journey rather than its conclusion, a foundation on which a great deal of careful work will need to be built.

The harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether this money delivers lasting value, is how the habitats it funds are designed, established and cared for over the decades that follow. Restoration is rarely a single act of planting or rewetting; it is a long process of establishment, adaptation and stewardship that can succeed or fail quietly years after the initial work is done. That challenge is made considerably more demanding by a climate that is changing faster than many of our native species can adapt. Habitats restored today must be capable of withstanding hotter, drier summers and milder, wetter winters, alongside the novel pests and diseases that a shifting climate brings with it.

The flagship projects already taking shape show what is possible when the science is right. In the Peak District National Park, for instance, more than 80 hectares of degraded upland moorland at Gun Moor are being transformed; restoring wet heath, rewetting deep peat that had dried out over years of degradation, and establishing native woodland on the lower slopes. Work of this kind depends on a detailed understanding of the underlying ecology, on choosing the right interventions for the specific conditions of each site, and on monitoring outcomes carefully enough to adapt as the landscape responds over time.

It is encouraging that the fund has been built around local partnership, delivered through the existing Farming in Protected Landscapes programme and rooted in the priorities of the people who know these places best. A great deal of this work takes place in our uplands, and the recent Towards a Flourishing Uplands review offered a timely reminder that nature recovery in these landscapes succeeds only when it is shaped with the farmers, land managers and communities who live and work there, rather than imposed upon them as something to be resisted. Farmers and land managers are rightly cast as central partners rather than bystanders, and the principle that locally rooted, trust-building partnerships deliver the best outcomes is one we wholeheartedly share. Public money alone, however, will not carry England to its 2042 target. Reaching that ambition will require landowners, finance, and businesses to invest alongside government in nature recovery that is credible, measurable, and built to endure, and to do so with the same rigour that public funds now demand and the same respect for the people whose lives and livelihoods are bound up in these places.

This is the work to which Kew Reach is dedicated. Drawing on the scientific expertise of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, we help partners design restoration that has resilience at its core, from evidence-led species selection that accounts for the climate of the future rather than the present, through to the long-term monitoring that proves habitats are not only created but sustained. By embedding ecological credibility into every stage, from baseline assessment through implementation, monitoring, and adaptation, restoration can move beyond a worthy ambition to become a durable asset for nature, for communities and for the wider economy that ultimately depends upon it.

The £30 million announced last week is a genuine step forward, and the momentum now behind nature recovery in England is real. The opportunity is to ensure that every hectare funded becomes habitat that still flourishes in twenty, thirty and forty years' time. For landowners, land managers, investors and policymakers alike, the decisions taken today about how that restoration is designed and delivered will shape the health of our most cherished landscapes for generations to come.