Nature recovery plan
The ‘Bridgend County Borough Local Biodiversity Action Plan: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Assessment and Revision 2014’ is our nature recovery plan. It lists our habitats as well as risks to them, and makes suggestions for conserving them. The ‘Bridgend County Borough Local Biodiversity Action Plan: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Assessment, Technical Report’ supports this document. Together they are known as the Local Biodiversity Action Plan (LBAP).
Free services nature does for people
The LBAP notes the good which nature does for humans, which are referred to as ‘ecosystem services’. For example, the land does us a service by purifying rainwater for people to drink. Nature does these valuable things for free, and if it didn’t, humans would have to pay to artificially create these services.
The biodiversity and ecosystem services assessment and revision 2014 document recommends how these services can be improved on. Meanwhile, the technical document describes the ecosystem services in each part of the county in detail.
How to use the documents
This LBAP is designed to work with other key policies that support local planning policy. In particular, the LBAP should be read alongside the Landscape Character Area (LCA) report by Land Use Consultants (LUC, 2013). The LCA describes our county’s different parts and what makes them unique.
Background of the documents
This Local Biodiversity Action Plan (LBAP) is an update of both volumes of the LBAP written in 2002. The new technical document notes how the ecosystem services were evaluated and mapped.