Front lines for nature

Inside the ambitious UK project rallying local communities to fight for wildlife

- James Fair

IT'S JUST AFTER 11AM ON THE NORMANTON Road in Derby. A man is striding across a parking lot, shouting at no one in particular, his words lost amid the urban hum of a weekday morning. Adam Slater, community organiser for Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, smiles as if he's heard it all before.

"You've got these two parks Arboretum Park and Normanton Park - and there were all these little pockets of green space in between that were often abused with fly-tipping and anti-social behaviour," he says. "It was sad, because this area doesn't have a lot of green space."

As part of The Wildlife Trusts' Nextdoor Nature project, which ran from 2022-2024 and aimed to reach people and communities that are largely excluded from "making decisions about nature", Adam was tasked with trying to connect local people to the city's wildlife.

This is not a tale of the miraculous conversion of a degraded habitat to one suddenly teeming with life. Instead, it recounts the first steps of a community's engagement with nature. The gains may not sound much compared to the global conservation success stories usually described in these pages, but in many ways, they are equally significant.

This part of Derby is poor, with a transient population of refugees and a very high percentage of people with ethnic minority backgrounds, mainly India and Pakistan. Studies have shown that children of a black or Asian background are half as likely to visit the countryside as white children, and that people from ethnic minority backgrounds have on average 11 times less access to green spaces. Poverty, language barriers, lack of transport and cultural issues are identified as the key reasons behind this exclusion.