Oxfordshire’s Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS)

Our local nature recovery strategy

Oxfordshire’s natural landscape is important, and we must ensure that we plan to create a more resilient, more connected, network of nature across the county.

Our local nature recovery strategy will allow us to develop a shared ambition to recover nature across Oxfordshire. 

A coordinated strategy for nature's recovery can help wildlife to flourish, improve the quality of our air and water, and mitigate the impacts of climate change. 

It's part of a new series of strategies that cover the whole of England, helping deliver on the 2021 Environment Act.  We will be publishing the documents associated with this project on this page. 

Find out more about a local nature recovery strategy on GOV.UK. 

Our ambition for Oxfordshire

We're leading for the county and bringing people and organisations interested in and caring about our wonderful habitats and species. 

The strategy will create a written list and a map to highlight areas of land that are particularly important for biodiversity. This decision-making will be influenced by the priorities collected from people across our county. The priorities will be linked to potential actions people across Oxfordshire can take in those areas. 

Defra’s video helps explain what a difference this work can make..

Get involved and have your say

'Please look at the details below to hear about any opportunities to get involved and have your say on the LNRS for Oxfordshire

Phase 1 (February to March 2024)

'This was our first information-gathering phase to hear your input, ambitions and priorities for nature's recovery in Oxfordshire. We held 12 workshops, two engagement events with parish councillors and one online survey for 40 days. 

This began the first phase of our engagement process with input from 1,038 people between the 20 February and the 31 March 2024. 

The data will now be analysed and a summary will be shared with you in May.

Phase 2 (May to June 2024)

We held an online webinar on 8 May to present a summary of the results from our workshops and survey, and to explain the process we intend to use for creating a map of the county for Summer 2024. Over 100 of you joined us. 

We also launched our mapping tool on Let’s talk Oxfordshire on 9 May, so you could tell us about habitat projects. This included: actions that you may have taken, are planning to take, or to tell us about land where you’re willing to support habitat creation, restoration, or improvement works but haven’t yet got plans. 

We also advised that if you already have digital maps data files/shape files that show where you have/want to take actions, you didn’t need to use the map, and could instead share these directly with us by email. We received about 15 emails and over 170 locations added to the map tool. 

Phase 3 (October to December 2024)

The draft Local Nature Recovery Strategy documents and map are available to view and download

The LNRS ran an online consultation for 45 days (18 Oct- 1 Dec). The LNRS attended around 50 engagement events (80 hours) with about 700 local people and organisations to raise awareness of the consultation. The consultation page had 7,100 total visits. The documents were downloaded a total of 3,200 times. Responses were submitted to the LNRS using the survey, on the map, and some people used our email contact to submit various attachments like pdfs, map data, and Word documents.

We received over 2,000 responses. 

• 127 submission on the online consultation page 
• 1960 ‘pins’ (comments) added to the map tool 
• About 50 additional submissions by email containing map comments, document comments, and other information. 

Now, it will take some time to collate, organise, and prepare the responses to publish in a public report which will be available online in 2025 for people to see what was said (and, in future, what we did).

Phase 4 (mid Autumn 2025)

Following a six week public consultation in October 2024 on the draft LNRS, we received 2,130 responses indicating strong local interest and support for delivering nature recovery in Oxfordshire.

This welcome feedback included suggestions for additional biodiversity priorities, actions to take, map locations to include, and other suggested changes. The LNRS team (a partnership of organisations) is now collaborating with the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery to compile the thousands of responses into a public report. We will then adjust the strategy (documents and map) accordingly and report on the changes.

Due to the impressively high volume of responses, the LNRS team will be allowed to take a few additional months to produce the final version. This will ensure thorough consideration of local input before publishing the final version of the LNRS in mid-Autumn 2025.

Despite this extension, Oxfordshire is maintaining a similar timeline to the other 47 LNRSs being developed across England. If you’d like to contribute to nature recovery initiatives now, many groups in Oxfordshire are already taking action, and links are available on this webpage to help you get involved.

How to help nature now

Remember that the LNRS is one tool of many that we can use to achieve nature’s recovery. The LNRS aims to complement existing work, not to replace or duplicate it. The LNRS’s aim is to help focus resources and effort towards shared goals for improving biodiversity in Oxfordshire. There are other things that you can do too with people and organisations who are creating space for nature in Oxfordshire now!

We can achieve nature recovery if we all work together

There are many things you can do right now to make a difference, whether you are an individual, a community group, a parish or town council, a business, a farmer, a landowner or a land-manager. Here are some ideas and where you can find more information from groups like Wild Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire’s local Wildlife Trust BBOWT, Community Action Groups Oxfordshire, and more. 

Documents

During the preparation and development of this local nature recovery strategy (LNRS), a large volume of information and documentation has been produced. Different people and organisations will be interested in different parts of this so below, we have listed where you can find useful documents and information if you would like to dive further into the preparation of the strategy.