Landscape Innovation - What is it and why do we need it?
By Fran Southgate
Living Landscape Advisor
With the current climate change crisis, we need an urgent paradigm shift at a societal level. Alarm bells are ringing, and we are left frantically trying to increase the pace of existing conservation efforts, whilst adapting wildlife and society to an unknown future. We need truly sustainable solutions which bring together people and planet, and which are both global, and local community based. We also just need to know what we can usefully do to help.
It’s a bewildering time even for seasoned conservationists, and it highlights the pressing need for novel ways of collaborating across sectors of society which we might not traditionally have included in our conservation efforts. Within the context of climate collapse, biodiversity declines, social challenges, entrenched farming systems and a faltering model of economic growth, there are a whole range of emerging approaches to buffering our communities, wildlife, landscapes and planet from forthcoming change. There has been an incredible response to this climate emergency, and there is an equally bewildering array of innovation, future proofing, regenerative land use and social enterprise coming into being.
To try and integrate some of the more novel wildlife conservation ideas with the old, Sussex Wildlife Trust and Sussex University are hosting a Landscape Innovation Conference in early 2020. The conference aims to instigate positive solutions, personal action and behavioural change, through the support and inspiration of peers and pioneers. We see landscape innovation as a means of enabling the landscapes we live in to support the long term livelihoods and wellbeing of wildlife and people in Sussex. Speakers at the conference will represent novel thinkers in their field, including young innovators and community leaders.
This conference aims to inspire action across a range of themes, including food and farming, natural capital and nature recovery networks, and resilient communities. We want to bring together the movers, the thinkers and the doers in one forum where we can develop new partnerships and support collaboration across an active network of practitioners from a range of sectors. This one-day event will challenge attendees to explore new ways of enabling and delivering a Wilder Sussex for improved sustainability, resilience and biodiversity. Despite our concerns for the future, we are excited by the opportunity to be actively involved in developing solutions, and we hope you will be too.
Book your place at the Landscape Innovation Conference - 23 January 2020
