Has your local authority declared a Nature Emergency? – Find out with a new service from the Woodland Trust, Climate Emergency UK, and mySociety!

The UK nations are among the most nature-depleted in the world. But there’s hope! Just as we’ve found with climate action, the UK’s local authorities hold the power to drive the change that our natural environment urgently needs. And that starts with declaring a Nature Emergency which commits the council to act.

So today we’re excited to launch Nature Emergency UK. This new website brings together the latest crowdsourced data on which UK local authorities have declared a nature emergency, alongside three metrics of the ambition of those declarations, plus case studies and model motions from the Woodland Trust, to help local councillors and local authority officers push for better.

For each local authority in the UK, our long-time collaborators Climate Emergency UK collected not only the exact wording and date of the council’s nature emergency declaration, but also the presence of three priority actions identified by the Woodland Trust, that mark out the councils with the most ambitious plans for nature recovery:

On top of that rigorous database, we’ve built a clean and simple interface that lets you quickly find your own council’s information, compare it with similar councils elsewhere in the UK, or look for patterns in nature emergency response amongst councils of the same type, population, and more.

Our Climate Programme lead, Zarino Zappia notes: “Through our work on both the Council Climate Scorecards and the Local Intelligence Hub, we’ve seen first-hand how important nature and biodiversity are as issues for local communities around the UK. We hope this new website will help citizens and community groups have informed discussions with their local representatives about the pace of action to restore nature near them, and then help those local councillors and council officers to discover and share best practice, in response to that democratic voice.”

If you’d like to see whether your local authority has a plan to restore nature in your area, check them out on Nature Emergency UK!