Biodiversity and Geological Collaboration in Bedfordshire

Delivering Action Plans

Selecting priorities for increased effort is an ongoing process, something that individual habitat and species action plans themselves do not really achieve. The England Biodiversity Strategy outlines the mechanisms to achieve national Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) targets and consider priorities. In 2007 Defra published “Conserving Biodiversity – The UK Approach”. From it the England Biodiversity Group developed a framework to improve habitat and species work integration and to promote landscape scale delivery. In response to this national framework the East of England Biodiversity Forum produced in 2008 a regional delivery plan covering similar issues.

From time to time “the Biodiversity Action Plan” is referred to as encapsulating the whole biodiversity agenda for Bedfordshire. The Bedfordshire action plans are reviews of the status of priority habitats and species with targets for conservation and enhancement and a string of related actions. They do not contain a shared agenda for managing the evidence base, for protecting key sites, for engaging others or for planning policy development. Bedfordshire’s biodiversity partnership, known as the Biodiversity Forum, does have a shared agenda which addresses the above points, agrees priorities and allows individual partners, collectively or individually, to take effective action to conserve, enhance and make accessible the wildlife and geological heritage of Bedfordshire.

The key elements of the shared agenda are set out in the jigsaw below. Click on any piece to link to relevant pages or documents.