Climate Change Strategy

Goal: Support nature recovery and create better access to green and blue space for wildlife to thrive and communities to enjoy

6.1 Climate change is directly contributing to the global decline in nature, resulting in a nature emergency and it will be impossible to address one aspect without the other. Species extinction is occurring at 1,000 times the pre-human rate, and the UK is one of the most nature depleted nations in the world, with one in six species at risk of extinction. For Coventry, we have seen impacts on species such as hedgehogs, water voles and swifts. 

Biodiversity is the variety of all life on Earth. It includes all animals and plants, including humans, other organisms and the habitats that support them. Ecosystem services are the direct and indirect contributions ecosystems provide for human life.

Figure 21 -The social and economic value of nature (Coventry City CouncilWest Midlands Local Investment in Natural Capital 2024)

6.2 There are vital links between nature, our health, wealth and security, which presents huge value to our economy - a recent report by Natural England (2024) estimates the UK’s natural wealth is just over £1.5 trillion. This has been calculated based on the ecosystem services nature provides including fresh water, air and food, building materials, places for people to relax and mitigation of climate change. The benefits of nature are shown in figure 21 below:

6.3 However, changes in land and sea use, exploitation of natural resources, global heating, rising pollution and the spread of invasive species are all contributing to a significant decline in biodiversity. Research by Green Finance Institute and University of Oxford (2024) has found that the damage to the natural environment is slowing the UK economy and could lead to a 12% reduction in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the future, larger than the impacts from the global financial crisis.

6.4 The UN Biodiversity Conference of the Parties 15 (COP15) agreed a set of goals to halt the extinction of threatened species and reverse nature loss with the effective recovery and conservation of habitats, with a critical target being to conserve and manage 30% of land, inland waters, coasts, and oceans by 2030. This goal is referred to as ‘30 by 30’. For Coventry, this currently stands at around 11% and a key challenge is to identify where the extra 19% (or 1874 hectares) is going to be found, given the city’s urban geography and limitations on available land. This will require a step change in current land use planning, with far more focus on integrating nature in urban areas to support nature’s recovery, alongside creation of new habitats and improving the quality of existing ones.

6.5 Although the 11% baseline is low, Coventry does contain many biodiverse rich areas including seven green flag world class urban green spaces, parks and University of Warwick campus. The city also has lots of parks, woodlands, river and canal corridors, allotments, street trees and private gardens, which link together to form part of a wider network of green and blue infrastructure. There is a significant challenge for us to better understand the habitats and biodiversity that exists across the city in order to protect and enhance them, as well as identify opportunities for creating more joined up green and blue corridors across the city.

Figure 22 – Quantity of green space per 1000 population by ward, areas in ha

6.6 However, there are big disparities in terms of green spaces across the city as illustrated in figure 22, with the wards highlighted in red being in some of the highest areas of green deprivation in the country. As a result, Coventry has been found to be one of the least green cities in England. An ENDS Green Cities Index 2023 survey out of 55 primary urban areas in England, ranked Coventry as the 54th greenest. This is backed up in the consultation, where local people told us they want to see better access to nature, more parks and open spaces and more trees to increase biodiversity, improve air quality and wellbeing. This presents a huge opportunity for taking citywide action.

6.7 Coventry isn’t unique in terms of the extent and access to green space for a city of its size; this presents an opportunity for the UK’s towns and cities to take action and finding innovative and creative ways to boost nature’s recovery. This will help to transform the look and feel of our city, and deliver widespread environmental, social and economic benefits. Restoring nature provides a solution to many of the challenges set out in this Strategy:

Integrating more spaces for nature and restoring habitats across Coventry will:

• create more attractive neighbourhoods
• bring cleaner air 
• create improvements to public health
• reduce inequalities in access to green space
• provide food security
• make our city more climate resilient
• sequester carbon to bring down the city’s emissions

We need to balance enhancing existing green spaces to support nature, with introducing new ones including within urban areas that may be on smaller scales but support biodiversity alongside addressing green deprivation.

6.8 We also need to be realistic that Coventry is a densely populated urban area, with land in short supply. Whilst we will strive to deliver as much of this in the city boundary as possible, using Council-owned land and working with partners and land holders, it is likely that we will also need to explore opportunities outside the city, using Council owned land and working with neighbouring authorities and landowners.

Figure 23 – Coventry’s Carbon Reduction Potential; Stretch Options and Offsetting Potential (Net Zero Carbon Route Map, 2023)

6.9 Key challenges to tackling the nature emergency also relate to funding, skills, knowledge and resource. The benefits of investing in nature are becoming far better understood and the recent creation of a natural capital market provides huge opportunities to attract private investment to support local nature recovery, which will deliver practical interventions as well as increasing conservation management skills and capacity. Coventry needs to ensure preparedness to attract natural capital investment in local nature recovery going forwards.

Tackling climate change through nature 

6.10 Nature-based solutions provide an important opportunity for carbon sequestration and offsetting. Restoring and creating carbon-capture habitats, is identified in the Net Zero Carbon Routemap as an increasingly important option in terms of offsetting carbon emissions, as per figure 23 below. The consultation feedback on the draft Climate Change Strategy showed that local people feel very strongly about trees and nature in the city and want to see more focus on conservation as well as creating new ones. Natural habitats ranging from trees, wetlands and wildflower meadows have multiple benefits – as well as absorbing carbon dioxide they contribute to their environment by providing the oxygen we breathe, improving air quality, provide shade and reduce temperatures, increase water filtration building resilience, preserve soil and support wildlife. Action needs to be taken now to restore habitats and create new ones, to enable them to develop and thrive to maximise carbon captured. Key to delivering this is ensuring that the right species of plants and trees are planted in the right place in order to thrive, alongside protecting and maintaining the city’s existing habitats.

The role of policy 

6.11 There have been many approaches to managing and reversing biodiversity loss through global and national policies, perhaps most importantly the COP15 ’30 by 30’.

6.12 The UK Environment Act’s (2021) introduced a requirement for developments to contribute a minimum 10% biodiversity net gain, which became a legal requirement in February 2024. Coventry, Warwickshire, and Solihull have required biodiversity net gain for several years, as supported by Coventry’s Biodiversity Net Gain Supplementary Planning Document. This national legislation will expand upon our work by creating a national register of sites where offsite biodiversity net gain offsetting will be directed; this will result in the creation of new natural paces in the city. Whilst it must be acknowledged that biodiversity net gain is triggered by loss of biodiversity as part of a development site and it will take time for new sites to establish, it provides a unique opportunity to improve the equitability of green space and biodiversity distribution across Coventry and help reverse current trends, particularly in areas of deprivation. We will work to find innovative ways to create Biodiversity Net Gain units to benefit enhancing our green spaces, alongside creating new ones, particularly in urban deprived areas.

6.13 The Council will explore whether our targets could be more ambitious, aiming for 20% biodiversity net gain instead of 10%. We will also consider integrating approaches more targeted at urban regeneration, such as the Urban Greening Factor and Access to Natural Greenspace Standards (ANGST), to reduce green space deprivation and ensure everyone can access green space in a 5 minute walk from their doorstep. These ambitions should be influenced by a comprehensive baseline data set that explores issues such as the distribution of green space, habitat qualities and opportunities for new green and blue infrastructure. Opportunities for new green and blue infrastructure should emphasise creating community-led spaces, for example, urban growing areas like orchards, community gardens and outdoor education spaces. Policies and strategies should also reflect national guidance such as the Environmental Improvement Plan, Natural England’s Green Infrastructure Framework and DEFRA’s Plan for Water. 

6.14 The Environment Act 2021 also introduces Local Nature Recovery Strategies as a way to manage regional improvements in green infrastructure. In Coventry, this Strategy is led by the West Midlands Combined Authority and will build upon previous Local Biodiversity Action Plans produced by the Warwickshire, Solihull, and Coventry Local Nature Partnership. Local Nature Recovery Strategies will agree priorities for nature recovery and propose actions in the locations where these priorities could be achieved.

6.15 Coventry’s Local Plan 2011-2031 and its nature conservation policies must reflect the strengthened national legislation and the ever-increasing need to reverse biodiversity loss. We will pursue ambitious approaches to ecological enhancement, including mandating species-specific enhancements such as bird and bat boxes on all developments to encourage biodiversity as well as features designed to mitigate issues like flooding, pollution, and the urban heat island effect.

6.16 Coventry’s Green Space Strategy 2019-2024 recognises and promotes the multi-functional nature of green spaces and aims to ensure that they are well managed and maintained, accessible and contribute to cross-cutting agendas. The revised Green Space Strategy 2025-2030 will give increased priority to enhancing and creating biodiversity in our open spaces and consider opportunities to enhance biodiversity alongside roads and cycle lanes, verges and on streets.

6.17 This is complemented by Coventry’s Urban Forestry Strategy 2022–2032, which recognises the importance of urban trees and forests in serving an ecosystem services function and proposes to plant a tree for every citizen, amounting to 360,000 trees by 2032. These tree planting efforts will combine the rejuvenation and expansion of our existing woodlands to sequester carbon and create wild spaces for people and nature, with tree planting in green spaces and along streets in order to improve air quality, create shade and mitigate urban heat island effects. We will need to be innovative in our approach to increasing the number of street trees across the city, overcoming challenges around utilities and parking.

6.18 It is important that existing policies and strategies are joined up to support a robust and coordinated approach to local nature recovery, which translates to practical delivery of interventions across the city.

Planning for Nature's Recovery 

6.19 To deliver at the scale required, we need to change our approach to how we use land to support local nature recovery. This will be developed via a Green and Blue Infrastructure Plan which could include areas given for habitat restoration and creation, biodiversity net gain, tree planting, rain gardens and flood management, identifying ‘wildbelt’ strategic locations for key links or corridors to support development of nature corridors. We are also keen to work with landowners, farmers as well as our residents and businesses to find ways of better supporting nature and developing new habitats.

6.20 We recognise that there are many competing land uses in Coventry, and this could serve as a constraint, but we need to rethink our approach to land use planning to ensure that nature recovery can co-exist with other land uses. We will explore how we can maximise opportunities to integrate nature across the city and create new habitats as part of new developments, including housing, industrial, transport and energy schemes and will seek to be innovative in our approach with an ambition to create exemplar projects for nature restoration. We will prioritise opportunities for restoring nature within the city boundary but will also explore how we can use land we own outside the city boundary to support reaching our 30% target, which could include larger re-wilding schemes.

6.21 The Local Nature Recovery Strategy will provide more detailed mapping that can be used to better understand our local habitats and opportunities for habitat restoration and creation. The Natural Capital Assessment Partnership (formerly the Habitat Biodiversity Audit) surveys habitats across Warwickshire, Coventry and Solihull, focusing on our Local Wildlife Sites which can support this, but we will need to be supplemented with rich data from across the whole city to develop a comprehensive strategy for enhancing biodiversity and providing habitats and natural places across Coventry. This will help us identify what interventions are required to support nature recovery and be fully costed in order to inform implementation plans.

Investing in Nature

6.22 Coventry is working with the West Midlands Combined Authority as one of four national pilot programmes focusing on Local Investment in Natural Capital. Part of this work will involve production of a Natural Capital Investment Prospectus, which will require development of a natural capital pipeline for the city, identifying opportunities for investment in ecosystem services. This could help to unlock ambitious landscape-scale rewilding projects which could provide a vital source of income to the Council through biodiversity net gain, carbon sequestration, natural capital units and tourism to help fund nature recovery, which includes creation and restoration of natural habitats as well as the resources to manage sites for long term conservation. This should be combined with improved accessibility to sites to ensure the benefits are felt by all across Coventry. This could include projects along the River Sowe, or in areas such as the Meriden Gap or the Coombe Abbey to Brandon Wood corridor.

Integrating Nature across the City 

6.23 To boost nature across the city, we must work to conserve existing habitats alongside creating new ones. This means enhancing our existing green and blue spaces to support more nature-rich habitats and taking an innovative approach to find new ways of embedding nature in areas deprived of green space. Greening our urban areas is important to provide connectivity to enable greater movement of wildlife throughout the city, but has much wider benefits such as helping to address flooding, pollution, and urban heat issues as well as increase an area’s sense of place, community, and wellbeing.

6.24 Figure 24 demonstrates the different interventions that can be delivered to create green infrastructure in an urban setting, which are set out in more detail in the Natural England Green Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide 2023 . We will work to deliver these measures in neighbourhoods across Coventry, developing pilots and identifying new ways of working to integrate nature into the fabric of our city.

Figure 24 – Natural England Building Blocks of Green Infrastructure (2023)

6.25 There is a need to review the way areas are managed and maintained across the city in order to maximise wildlife. We need to increase capacity and specialist training and skills development for staff and volunteers to improve standards of conservation management to benefit wildlife. The management of amenity grassland presents opportunities to change grass mowing practices to create wildflower meadows to attract more wildlife and add colour and variety to the urban landscape. Tree planting and careful development of new wetlands in parks can provide increased habitat diversity and a more interesting landscape for people to enjoy, encouraging interactions between people and nature. The Council already has a policy to use peat-free compost, but we need to work towards reducing and removing the use of herbicides and pesticides that can be damaging to wildlife. 

6.26 Coventry is fortunate to have 45 allotments across the city, which are important habitats for wildlife providing food, shelter and breeding sites. The scope to make more use of this valuable network across the city presents a huge opportunity for boosting biodiversity, climate resilience and food security, as well as an important resource to communities to support well-being. There is scope to work more closely with the city’s Allotment Association to make them more accessible and generate wider benefits. This could include creating more community group plots and linking up with the Food Network and local food banks to provide fresh seasonal produce to those most in need.

6.27 Our watercourses are an extremely valuable and often overlooked resource for ecology, climate resilience, and wellbeing. We must continue to tackle waste and pollution issues while enhancing these areas by de-culverting underground watercourses such as at Palmer Lane and Abbots Lane, improving river corridor habitats, and supporting flood risk management. The £3.4m Sherbourne Valley Project, led by the Warwickshire Wildlife Trust in partnership with the Council and a number of other key organisations within the city could be replicated in other areas including the River Sowe, to improve water quality and flood management as well as improving access to nature for people in a deprived area.

6.28 The canal runs through the city, providing a unique green-blue corridor. The Canals and River Trust is always working to improve biodiversity, whether that is through the use of coir rolls to create a soft vegetated bank, or planting fruit trees which will provide food for people and wildlife. There is an opportunity to connect Sustainable Urban Drainage to drain into the canal network and we continue to look at new ways to unlocking the potential for heating and cooling too.

Working together for nature's recovery

6.29 There are clear links between all of the themes in this Strategy. A coordinated approach which actively seeks ways to incorporate nature into all elements of our work and city planning will be vital.

6.30 To support this joined up approach, the Council have established an officer working group that captures both Green and Blue Infrastructure to ensure we are coordinated in our approach to planning and managing our green and blue space. The role of the group is to identify opportunities and develop ideas and projects to help enhance our green and blue space and maximise the benefits they generate for biodiversity, climate resilience and well-being. This work feeds into the Nature Based Pathway Group, where organisations such as Warwickshire Wildlife Trust, Canal and River Trust, Environment Agency, Garden Organic and the city’s universities are working with the Council to drive forward this agenda, projects and funding opportunities.

6.31 We have a long history of successful collaboration with organisations and communities, and we will build upon existing relationships with stakeholders to help develop projects that support local nature recovery. This includes small scale habitat protection and creation initiatives, to large scale projects such as the £3.5m River Sherbourne restoration project, led by Warwickshire Wildlife Trust. We also want to work with businesses and organisations looking to invest in nature, whether that’s through funding in our Natural Capital Prospectus or volunteer time to support projects on the ground.

6.32 We want to increase community involvement in managing and maintaining natural green spaces, this includes Friends of Parks groups, tree wardens and other conservation volunteers, as well as allotment holders and similar third-sector groups. Their work can help promote biodiversity and build pride in the quality and beauty of our open green spaces as well as creating opportunities to grow green jobs and provide training opportunities to help support a just transition.

Supporting nature at home

6.33 Local people can help support nature at home and in their local area. This is really important to help create wildlife corridors across the city and our residential areas have a huge role to play in this. There are a number of practical measures residents can take depending on space they have available, this could range from a balcony, window box or container filled with bee and butterfly friendly plants, installing a bee hotel, bird feeders and providing water for wildlife. Measures such as swift bricks and nest boxes provide important nesting space in urban areas to support bird and bat populations. For those with more outside space they could leave long areas of grass and plant wildflowers to support habitats and create small spaces in boundaries to help wildlife to move about gardens. Those with gardens could also consider what materials are used, with grass and gravel being better for planting supporting nature and climate resilience than paved areas. There are lots of useful resources to get more ideas and inspiration here:

#TeamWilder | Warwickshire Wildlife Trust Garden Organic - Discover organic growing

Recommendations

6.34 It is clear that investing in nature will deliver significant benefits to Coventry, not only boosting biodiversity but helping to tackle climate change, making the city more climate resilient, create more attractive neighbourhoods with better access to green space, benefiting our citizens and nature. The recommendations developed through the Nature Based Pathway Group are:

• To support the development of a Local Nature Recovery Plan for Coventry, a richer database needs to be developed of the city’s land assets and potential nature conservation value, which includes a citywide in-depth species and habitat survey
• In order to work towards ’30 by 30’, the city must focus on conserving existing habitats and creating new ones, and use natural capital as a tool to increase investment in nature and support conservation management of sites
• Develop new ways to integrate nature across the city, creating new corridors within urban areas and exploring opportunities for larger scale re-wilding projects which may involve working cross-border with other authorities and landowners, alongside partner organisations such as Warwickshire Wildlife Trust
• Improve habitats along river and canal corridors across the city, supporting initiatives to improve water quality and flood risk management
• Upskill staff and volunteers in the management of green spaces for nature, including developing training programmes which teach conservation management skills, which can be implemented in parks and areas of open space.