Newport For Nature Project Launch, Newport Memorial Hall on Sunday 12th September at 2pm

Save the date! Newport launches an exciting new 18-month project this month to enhance biodiversity, create wildlife-friendly spaces, and improve our knowledge of local wildlife, funded by the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority’s Sustainable Development Fund and led by Newport Area Environment Group.

The project’s vision is to create a network of wildlife-friendly spaces and corridors across Newport and its environs, connecting town and countryside, supported, maintained and enjoyed by residents and visitors alike, providing climate change resilience but also colour and birdsong, calm, joy and wellbeing for all. You can sign up to the newsletter to keep up to date with project activities here: http://eepurl.com/hFCZ75.

All are welcome to the project’s launch at Newport Memorial Hall on Sunday 12th September at 2pm where wildlife gardening practitioners and others will be on hand to offer advice and information on how to get involved.

A combination of climate change and biodiversity loss is causing enormous and rapid change across the world, change that will impact us all profoundly. Planting trees and creating wildlife-friendly spaces will help establish areas that are more diverse, larger, in better condition, better connected, and thus more able to adapt to or recover from this change.

With more of our wildlife and wild areas disappearing year after year, it is more important than ever that space is created for nature in gardens and public spaces. Collectively, gardens can be important wildlife areas in their own right, so the Newport For Nature project will be encouraging people to improve their gardens for wildlife. There are loads of things you can do, large and small, from planting a few pollinator-friendly flowers, allowing an area of your garden to revert to nature, to creating a wildlife pond.  The project will offer ideas and tips, and a workshop or two.

The project aims to plant a tree for every member Newport’s population, finding carefully chosen sites on public open space and community areas, private land and gardens.

Project Manager Richard Sylvester commented:

 “As well as helping wildlife in your garden, you can help by offering a space for trees, and get involved in tree planting events. Trees help to mitigate climate change, but also play an important role in climate change adaptation, providing cooling and shading, helping to reduce flooding, as well as enhancing biodiversity within and about the town.”

Finally, the project will encourage people to gather observations of wildlife in their gardens, on their walks, in the open spaces and back lanes of Newport and its surrounds, and record them using an existing wildlife monitoring app from the West Wales Biodiversity Information Centre.

Familiar hedgerow flowers and garden birds are more visible ‘indicators’ of the general health of wildlife and habitats. The observations, tree planting and wildlife sites will be used to create a wildlife baseline and a biodiversity map of Newport.

Newport For Nature project launch is at Newport Memorial Hall on Sunday 12th September at 2pm. For more information or to get involved in the project contact richard@naeg.org.uk