The Draft Shortlist of Priorities for Nature Recovery in Kent and Medway is now Published!

This week, we published our Draft Shortlist of Priorities on Earth Day.  We hadn’t set out to publish on this specific date, but it couldn’t have been more apt!  Earth Day is intended to highlight the urgent need for environmental protection and promote positive action for biodiversity, and that’s exactly what our Draft Shortlist of Priorities intends to do in Kent and Medway.

This is a significant point in the Making Space for Nature project, and has been months in the making; we’ve run workshops and surveys, we’ve been out across the county, meeting and talking with as many people as we can to see what they want for nature recovery in the county. And now we are one step away from finalising this list, ready for it to be incorporated into our Local Nature Recovery Strategy as our official Priorities for Nature Recovery in Kent and Medway.

But before that happens, it’s really critical that you have your say on the Draft version,  especially since the Priorities list will ultimately inform the potential nature recovery actions that funding and investment will be directed to.

So we have produced a number of things for you to look at.  Firstly, the Draft Shortlist of Priorities itself, which you can view here:

View the Draft Shortlist for Priorities Here

Even better, you can look at the Draft Shortlist of Priorities in an interactive way through a survey that asks you to rank each priority in turn.  Getting your immediate impression of each priority, and whether you feel some are more important than others, is really valuable feedback to help inform what we need to focus on when we next get together at our Shortlisting Workshops:

Interactive Draft Priorities Shortlist

But, if you want to work with us in detail to finalise the Draft Shortlist, then the Shortlisting Workshops really are the best way.  At these workshops, we will drill down into each priority and think about whether any need further strengthening, or perhaps there are some that actually wouldn’t be that useful to nature recovery.  We will be discussing whether there any further priorities necessary to recover the county’s nature, and whether all our priority habitats are appropriately represented.  We will also be thinking about whether there is anything outside of the strategy’s remit, which you are concerned will not be picked up elsewhere. Click the links below to book on to the workshops:

2nd May NIAB East Malling, 09:30-13:00

7th May Three Hill Sports Park Folkestone, 13:00-16:00

9th May The Stag Theatre Sevenoaks, 09:30-13:00

When we shortlisted the Priorities, we went from some 800 suggested outcomes for nature down to the 60 or so that we find ourselves at now.   As you can imagine, this was quite an undertaking!  And as we move through the project, we want to make sure we are completely transparent about everything we are doing so that you can understand the process, see clearly at what stage certain priorities may have been selected out, and appreciate the rationale behind every decision.  As such, we have created a full report that details the shortlisting process (and which, at 166 pages, we have affectionately joked is the “MS4N War and Peace”).  You can see the report at the link below:

Creating the LNRS Draft Priorities Shortlist for Kent and Medway – the Full Report