Natural Cambridgeshire has set up Net Gain Cambridgeshire & Peterborough to provide a means for landowners to promote their biodiversity offsetting sites and for these to be visible to local authority planners, ecologists, developers and their planning agents, architects, other professionals.
The site also aims to signpost those interested in Biodiversity Net Gain, whether professional or the wider public, to useful information and resources. The Environment Act 2021 and UK Government policy aims to leave nature in a better state than we inherited, and hopefully this is a goal we can all share. However, achieving it in the face of seemingly inexorable development pressures is a challenge.
Biodiversity Net Gain has been devised to allow the development sector to contribute to the achievement of wider environmental goals. While the principle may seem straightforward, the process is much more complicated. This is where we hope that Net Gain Cambridgeshire & Peterborough will help by providing a one-stop shop of helpful information and a registry of local biodiversity net gain sites.
Net Gain Cambridgeshire & Peterborough has been designed as a BNG portal with interactive map that clearly demonstrates the relationships of biodiversity net gain sites to the priorities within our Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Local Nature Recovery Strategy. In this way it will allow users to see where offsetting sites lie within the network and how they contribute to wider nature recovery efforts. Our aim is that it helps guide the location of Biodiversity Net Gain sites so these provide the greatest gains for nature but we also hope it allows developers and others to choose which sites best meet their BNG needs.
Over time Biodiversity Net Gain has huge potential to support nature recovery, to help landowners diversify their incomes and for developers to meet their offsite biodiversity requirements in locations that best support nature recovery.
We hope you make use of Net Gain Cambridgeshire & Peterborough, whether you are a landowner registering your site, or those involved in the development process trying to choose the most appropriate locations for your biodiversity offsetting needs.
If you have any questions we will be more than happy to advise.
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