Frequently Asked Questions

The route of the corridor runs from Ashdown Forest in the High Weald through the Low Weald and via the chalklands of the South Downs National Park, and along our major rivers to the Sussex coast where there are significant efforts being made to restore the kelp forests on the sea floor. This route connects the Weald to the waves.

Buffered by regenerative and wildlife-friendly food production we aim to establish 100 miles of largely contiguous habitats for wildlife along this route, connecting them as much as possible so that species can move through the landscape easily.

No. Rewilding, as it is popularly understood, is just one component of nature recovery. Rewilding takes human pressure off a landscape so that habitats can recover at scale and natural ecological processes can regain a foothold. These processes have evolved over millennia to find the perfect balance that gives us clear air, water and energy, and provides security for the entire food web. While we need more rewilding to restore these processes, we also need to create and restore habitats as part of regenerative agricultural land and more sustainable urban areas.

We cannot remove human pressures everywhere. Nor should we. Landscapes with segregated “wilderness” and human land use not only verge on the impossible in our part of the world (there are around 284,000 people living within the corridor) but ignore the services that healthy ecosystems provide. To create a wildlife corridor in Sussex, we need to balance rewilding with a range of other solutions to nature recovery nature restoration, from nature-friendly farming techniques such as regenerative agriculture, to wildlife gardening.

Food production is a fundamental need and places an inescapable demand on our landscapes. In this time of heightened concern over food security we are working with farmers and farmer clusters to ensure that our landscape continues to produce food but does so with nature in mind, finding ways to build connectivity for nature through and on farms from core habitat to core habitat. The corridor is not intending to take large swathes of viable land out of food production but make use of unproductive and marginal land. By investing in soil health and thriving pollinator populations, we will help to protect the conditions we need for food production now and in the future.

Our food and fuel systems are vulnerable to shocks. A ‘just in time’ supply chain that ensures maximum efficiency in the rate that our food is processed and delivered to us means that there is very little slack to absorb any unexpected delays or shortages. War and conflict, economic instability and trade disputes will all shake these complex systems, and many around the world are feeling the pain of that at the moment. Environmental crises can be catastrophic for food production, and these can be acute, such as drought, flooding, and extreme weather or tectonic events, or chronic and far less visible, such as the rapid decline in our pollinators, water and air pollution and the degradation of our soils. While we tackle the acute pain points, this chronic, invisible damage continues and if we don’t make it a priority to tackle this now then we will miss crucial windows of opportunity to reverse it and protect future food supplies and clean water.

Landowners, land managers and farmers will play a critical role in this project, but it will only come about through significant community collaboration. This will call on the knowledge and capability of our schools, places of worship, community groups, gardeners, businesses and local government. Weald to Waves is a citizen project and is working with a broad range of partners across the landscape.

The Sussex countryside is crisscrossed with footpaths, permissive paths and bridleways. Our rivers and seas are enjoyed by kayakers, swimmers and anglers. The corridor will incorporate many of these public access points and potentially create new opportunities for engaging with wildlife. We hope to harness citizen science and draw on the public imagination to shape, monitor and celebrate the corridor.

We’ve seen from other successful nature recovery work that a healthy landscape will encourage the return of species by providing the conditions needed for them to survive and thrive. There may be opportunities to support the reintroduction of both fauna and flora that have been lost from our landscapes or to boost numbers of those in dangerous decline.

The project team is supported by a combination of grant funding and philanthropic donations. We are using this to explore how we can support land managers and farmers to connect with emerging land management schemes and markets around carbon and biodiversity that acknowledge and fund stewardship of these environmental assets and services.

The corridor needs to be coherent and connected but that connection does not necessarily need to be contiguous throughout for it to be considered a success. Wildlife corridors in the UK are based on the Lawton principles of more, bigger, better and joined up. Within this model there also is a role for ‘stepping stones’, areas of rich habitat that are close enough to enable birds and insects, for example, to travel between them and can be considered a connected habitat.

Most landscapes in the UK are already fragmented by infrastructure or development that prevent key species from crossing them, causing populations to become isolated and vulnerable to local extinction. While road verges and waysides can provide valuable linear habitats, we also need to recognise the effect of new and existing infrastructure.

The UK already has a small number of green bridges, including one that crosses the A21 at Scotney Castle in Kent and another, the Cockcrow green bridge currently being built near Wisley. However, Europe is far ahead of us! France has over 100 green ‘écoponts’, with many more being planned. The Netherlands has at least 47 ‘ecoducts’ including one that hosts ponds and wetlands over road and rail infrastructure.

If we are to achieve sustainable landscapes, green infrastructure needs to become normal in the UK. Weald to Waves is working to evidence this need and support green infrastructure in the corridor.

The project is coordinated through the Knepp Wildland Foundation, which sits at the heart of the proposed route. The project team are supported by an independant Advisory Group, made up of experts and practitioners from a diverse range of fields, from ecology and conservation to engineering and education. The project is also made up of a wide range of partners who we work with to achieve a wildlife corridor across Sussex.

We have always had wildlife corridors across the country; hedgerows, field margins, wetlands and woodland are all corridors and help wildlife to move around our landscape. However, over the years these crucial links have been severed by the removal or narrowing of hedgerows, loss of our woodlands and forests, draining of our wetlands and farming right up to our field margins. We have the skeleton of corridors all around us that we can restore through careful work. Weald to Waves is part of a new era of organised landscape-scale nature recovery and in its ambition to cross one of the most populated and built-up areas of the country. Since we started the project, numerous other projects have appeared around the country, giving hope for genuine and sustainable national landscape recovery.

A corridor helps wildlife to move and therefore there always is a possibility that this could enable competitors, non-native species and pathogens to move more easily too. However, we know from places where nature is recovering at scale at its own pace that equilibrium is quickly established and that the resilience of healthy ecosystems can withstand these threats. 

We have never had more clarity over the crisis we face as the natural systems that we survive on plunge further into a state of emergency. For the first time, government funding is being put into nature recovery and land management policy is starting to align through the Environmental Land Management Scheme. Developers are being mandated by law to meet Biodiversity Net Gain goals and nature recovery is now underpinned by new laws that sit within the Environment Bill. Furthermore, Local Nature Recovery Strategies promise new motivations for landowners to set up voluntary conservation covenants that can make this work viable and visible. It is a very exciting moment, but it is also fragile. We need clear templates for ambitious landscape-scale recovery programmes that cross not just roads but social and industry divides and restore connectivity between both nature and communities.

Sussex has many low-lying areas that are prone to flooding. Many of these communities have been badly affected in recent years and, nationally, flood damage is thought to cost us around £1.3 billion each year. Flood risk is made worse by removing natural defences such as river meanders, wetlands and woodlands that help to slow flow and hold water upstream. Weald to Waves is working with the Adur River Recovery project, to provide a template for major river recovery to return these waterways to a healthy state and reduce both the flood risk and the levels of pollutants in our rivers and, in turn, our seas.

Just like our ecosystems, the corridor does not end at the coast. The seas around Sussex were once rich in wildlife, with kelp forests once stretching 40 kilometres, providing critical shelter, feeding and nursery grounds for marine life and creating one of the most productive and biodiverse environments on the planet. kelp also has the potential to store carbon, improve water quality and reduce coastal erosion by absorbing the power of waves. Since the 1980s, however, over 96 per cent of it has been destroyed. To reverse this decline, trawling has been prohibited in over 300 square kilometres of the sea bed, and the Sussex Bay initiative, driven by the Sussex Wildlife Trust, is restoring these missing underwater forests and returning biodiversity to our seas and shores. The corridor will connect both marine, riparian and terrestrial efforts.

The corridor will be a wonderful place to witness nature recovery in action. We have brilliant research and ecology teams in Sussex who will provide ample resources and specialism to bring this work to light. We are also working with a range of partners, including education institutions, heritage groups, youth and community networks to harness the power of citizen science and reporting in order to track success and capture learning. This learning will be made publicly available so that the corridor can influence other local programmes as well as contribute to national policy.