Our Vision

Our vision is to enhance Scilly’s intricate, natural, and farmed landscape, small in scale, rich in wildlife, contrasting, connected and diverse, with thriving communities, and with sustainable enterprises protecting our future.

This Scilly bespoke Landscape Recovery Scheme is part of Defra’s Environmental Land Management Scheme. It aims to restore, create and maintain Scilly’s natural environment, by rewarding sustainable and resilient land management and regenerative farming and conservation grazing practices. These will promote the recovery and flourishing of threatened species, safeguarding our shared natural heritage in a changing climate.

Led by a collective and shared vision from Scilly’s farmers and land managers, this scheme will enable soils to be returned to healthy, living functioning and productive systems, capturing, and keeping carbon where it belongs, mitigating against climate change.

This spirit of collaboration, and working together towards a common goal, will capture a sense of ownership and also protect, strengthen and keep alive the distinct character of Scilly’s landscape and heritage features. Well-managed, biosecure habitats and farming practices, will in turn support the production of healthy local food and maintain rich mosaics of connected and biodiverse habitats. These habitats include coastal heathlands, wetlands, grasslands, successful crops, wild flower meadows, cover crops, maintained hedges, woodland, and rare arable plants. This will enable a diversity of plants, invertebrates, pollinators, birds, bats, and the iconic Scilly Shrew to flourish, and will see access, interpretation and enjoyment improved.

Together, working in partnership, we can integrate nature’s success and thriving businesses with how we successfully manage our land.