Mapping Green Corridors in York

Uncategorized Tuesday 2 September 2025

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Written by Jean McKendree, Stockholm Environment Institute

Demonstrating how the Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS) can transition into delivery

Shifting from strategy to delivery 

How do we go from broad regional strategies linked to policies for biodiversity improvements towards identifying specific places in actual neighbourhoods where land use changes can take place? And how can we include relevant communities in these discussions to maximise their co-benefits? These are the challenges the YPIP team are investigating as part of the Future Yorkshire Land Use strand of work.

The Green Corridors project, led by St Nicks with partners from Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) at the University of York and the City of York Council, aims to create “more, bigger, better and more joined up” green spaces across the city. With the Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS) for North Yorkshire scheduled to be released early in 2026, there is added impetus to create a detailed database of York’s public accessible green spaces and plans for how to implement the LNRS and other biodiversity actions “on the ground”.

Bringing stakeholders together and building on existing resource 

A YPIP workshop held at SEI on 20 June 2025 brought together eleven experts from academia, government organisations, policy makers, community groups and independent bodies. The aims of the workshop were to begin the process of identifying the best measures and locations for nature improvement actions in York aligned with the draft LNRS and to get expert input about the usefulness of the Wild York map, developed by St Nicks, for coordinating planning by community and governance groups.

The experts provided a rapid assessment of the current biodiversity state for identified community green spaces. They then looked at the list of measures from the LNRS for each habitat to select the most promising actions for nature improvement across the city and finally their prioritisation of spaces for immediate (next 18 months), medium- (1 to 2 years) and longer-term (3 years plus) changes.

Using data on the LNRS supplied by Simon Pickles, Director of the North and East Yorkshire Ecological Data Network, Steve Cinderby (SEI) built upon the existing Wild York map to add this expert derived data to assist in the next stages of LNRS implementation.

 

An example output map derived from this expert input and the Wild York map

Positive feelings towards next steps 

The next step in these activities is to bring together local wildlife charities and community groups working on the city’s green spaces to further “ground truth” the map and to create action plans for implementation of the identified measures in the priority areas. We will also be discussing possible funding from the North Yorkshire Council tied to the LNRS and Biodiversity Net Gain policies.

The feedback on the workshop was that it was extremely useful both to develop the map and to bring together key planners.

Tim Johns, Senior Policy Officer from North Yorkshire Council commented “I think the YPIP workshop was a great model for demonstrating how the LNRS can transition into delivery.”