Five year strategy 2020 - 2025

By 2025, we want to have achieved significant progress in reversing the decline of Cumbrian wildlife on land and at sea.

We want to see evidence that demonstrates the natural environment is in a much wilder and more resilient condition such that:

• The current downward trend in the variety and richness of wildlife & wild places has been successfully reversed and the natural environment is recovering across Cumbria. We want to see more space dedicated to wildlife in Cumbria, and a better-managed and joined-up network of wildlife-rich places. We need to restore our broken ecosystems at a landscape-scale, with missing wildlife returning on land, in freshwater and at sea.
• Recovery of wildlife, habitats and natural processes has become integral to how Cumbria tackles the climate emergency and achieves the 2037 net carbon zero target for the county.
• More people have opportunities to enjoy and learn about wildlife and can benefit from having abundant wildlife and a natural health service on their doorsteps. We want more people, local communities and organisations to be involved in taking action to put nature into recovery where they live.

Our Approach

Guided by our values, the Trust will approach this vital work with a renewed sense of urgency, determination and focus. We will raise and invest more than £15M in delivering this Strategy and work to get more people actively involved by providing more volunteering opportunities.

As well as direct activity on our nature reserves and influencing what others do at home and in the wider countryside, the key means of achieving our ambitions will be to work with and through others to deliver a shared range of practical work projects and programmes. This will require the Trust to be flexible, opportunistic and focused.

We will collaborate in partnership to find nature-based solutions to shared problems especially where they bring multiple benefits for people and wildlife.

1. Delivering nature-based solutions

 by playing a leading role in tackling the wildlife crisis and climate emergency on land and sea:

… directly through increasing the urgency, scale and scope of our work programmes and by becoming even more influential leaders of change by, for example, delivering peat, grassland and woodland restoration programmes and providing more ecological advice to farmers and landowners. We will speak up for Cumbrian wildlife and energise more people to take action to create a Wilder Cumbria and a Nature Recovery Network across the county. We will continue to increase the area of land in our care.

2. People and wildlife

Making wildlife and local nature even more relevant and important in the lives of people and local communities…

by expanding and improving our work to engage people with nature through events and learning for all programmes. We will improve both the physical and intellectual access to our nature reserves. We will also develop our base at Gosling Sike and its role in supporting health and wellbeing programmes in partnership with others in the City of Carlisle.

3. Raising our game

to meet the scale of the challenges ahead.

We will improve our governance arrangements to become even more transparent and accountable in meeting the needs and expectations of our beneficiaries. We will get better at what we do and how we deliver it so we can have an even greater impact for people and wildlife.

Generating new income and resources will be key so that we can increase the scale of our work to match the scale of the wildlife crisis.  We will be forward looking and investing in new IT systems and processes to improve our efficiency and effectiveness and to drive reductions in the environmental footprint of our activities.

We value our people and will seek to expand our capacity and capability by recruiting more staff and volunteers and invest in their professional training and personal development.

Read more about Cumbria Wildlife Trust's Five-Year strategy (PDF)