The duality of the built environment and the natural world is becoming more important as we are now realising the necessity for both to coalesce to provide what future society needs.
For centuries, the norm has been to build without much consideration for the natural world. Now that the impacts of climate change are evident, causing depletion of ecosystems and inflicting human suffering, it is of utmost importance that future development happens alongside nature recovery.
A key player in the UK as we shift to this new norm is Natural England, the government’s strategic advisor on the natural environment.
To date, Natural England has been viewed as a regulator by construction professionals, but this is about to change, according to the organisation’s chair Tony Juniper.
“The substance of government policy for some years now has moved beyond conservation, which is about hanging on to the remnants, and into this much more dynamic and interesting space of nature recovery,” he said.
To do this, Natural England has said a new strategic approach is imperative. This will move from site-by-site mitigation towards coordinated, landscape-scale nature recovery beyond the boundaries of each development site.
“The focus will be on the big picture,” says Natural England strategic director Brad Tooze. “To date, the planning system has been about how to minimise impacts on a site or on species in a location, usually through some form of mitigation or compensation at that local level.
“At best, what that does is stop further harm within that locality, but what it doesn’t do is look at how we are managing that whole system.”
Both Juniper and Tooze detail how site-specific mitigation often results in ad hoc, expensive solutions that prevent immediate harm to the environment but do not rebuild the ecology needed to sustain wildlife and human communities in the long term.
A prime example of this is HS2’s controversial “bat tunnel”. The 1km-long structure will cover the HS2 tracks as they run alongside Sheephouse Wood, a Site of Special Scientific Interest in Buckinghamshire. The woodland is home to 13 species of bat, including the protected Bechstein’s bat, and the structure is intended to protect them from being hit by the high-speed trains.
“This solution very much speaks to the historic approach whereby we seek to minimise the impact on a designated protected feature, which is a very important thing to do,” Juniper says. “However, a big question would be, can we do better in investing those resources into restoring the habitat of that bat at landscape scale?”
This could include moving bat communities away from the HS2 site and “creating the means for that species to really thrive in the future by creating a bigger population that is more robust and more resilient,” Juniper continues.
Natural England’s goal is about working to “recover nature for growth, health and security” through habitat creation, catchment-wide interventions and nature-based defences aimed at both compensating for local impacts and delivering net environmental gains.
“The object of our and the government’s new policies will require us all collectively to look beyond these apparent simple trade-offs: is it growth, or is it nature? Do we look after the wildlife, or do we build and unlock economic growth through that?” Juniper says.
“Now, we want to take an alternative approach, whereby we say, actually it’s both, and we can and really must pursue both together.”
One way Natural England intends to do this is through Environmental Delivery Plans (EDPs) and the Nature Restoration Fund (NRF), which are key elements of the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025.
EDPs will constitute a package of conservation measures beyond site-specific solutions, aiming to offset and address the environmental impacts of development. They will be paid for through developer contributions into the NRF.
“One way in which the current site-based system struggles is in addressing some of the more systemic impacts on the environment,” Tooze says.
“Impacts that are cumulative and widespread like pollution can be very hard to spot treat on location.
“What the NRF will do is give us the ability to step outside of the site and to look on a much larger scale at what we can do to address those widespread impacts and be much more strategic.”
One current project Natural England is touting as a prime example of this approach is in Dorset, where it is using nutrient neutralisation tools to create a substantial nature reserve in the headwater streams of rivers feeding Poole Harbour, an internationally protected wetland. Juniper and Tooze describe how this intervention unlocked planning permission for around 3,700 homes that would otherwise add to pollution to the harbour.
Natural England is also advocating for nature-based solutions (NBS) to strengthen infrastructure resilience in the face of climate change. Keeping more water within the landscape, restoring floodplains, creating woodlands that intercept runoff and other measures can protect roads and railways, as well as secure water supplies for communities.
“We know that NBS can be a really powerful way of defending railways and roads, as well as ensuring water security by keeping more water in the environment,” Juniper explains.
“There are lots of things that point in the same direction. If only we can see that big picture and get beyond either/or, and into this space of both/and.”
Juniper and Tooze also point to examples where early collaboration between developers and conservation bodies has yielded positive results. One such case is the £38bn Sizewell C nuclear power station project on the Suffolk coast, where planners and conservationists integrated habitat creation and mitigation in the design phase of the nuclear power plant.
“When they were designing the infrastructure needed for the plant they put in enough headroom right at the start and so were doing the nature recovery before they even poured any concrete,” Juniper says.
“They’ve got a plan that will lead to some really quite significant habitat creation that’s far and away going to compensate way beyond everything that’s being lost.”
Tooze highlights the importance of thinking about environmental parameters sooner rather than later.
“If you do get ahead of these trade-offs by taking a strategic view at the start, you can achieve so much more,” he says.
Taking the focussed route of nature recovery and development co-existing will not only be key to the built environment in the future but will also help Natural England fulfil its purpose.
“There’s a synergy of interest,” Juniper states. “Quite often it comes down to this idea that these things are automatically in conflict – growth and development on one side and nature recovery on the other.
“I think having an organisation that can see both sides at once, in terms of being a regulator that has an official duty put to us by government to facilitate and foster economic growth at the same time as being the nature recovery organisation, there’s power that comes with that.”
For Juniper, who was previously the executive director of environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth, the step change in attitudes towards the natural world’s place in supporting growth is about correcting the mistakes of those before us.
“If you’re an ecologist and you work close to these issues, inevitably there is a level of frustration coming from, in my case, nearly half a century of activity which hopefully has been more or less useful, but nonetheless is accompanied by a continuing decline of the natural environment,” he concludes.
“This is a very long-haul journey that we are on, but I do think, over the last couple of years, we’ve reached the bottom of the decline and hopefully are now starting to come up the other side.”
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