A visionary partnership project working to promote integrated management of a viable and enhanced landscape in the West Weald for people and nature.

The West Weald Landscape Project (WWLP) covers a large area of 240 square kilometres (nearly 60,000 acres) at the western end of the Low Weald, north of the town of Petworth. A broad partnership of organisations including environmental bodies and local authorities are involved in the project.

The WWLP works at a landscape scale to conserve and enhance the special natural environment of this area, by creating more space for nature and natural processes and hence benefiting people too through the provision of ‘ecosystem services’ such as flood alleviation and carbon dioxide fixation from the atmosphere.

In addition to a focus on the most important core forest areas and their rare species of woodland wildlife, we aim to establish better connections between sites to enable species to both thrive within them and be able to move across a more natural landscape, giving them a better chance of adapting to the impacts of climate change in particular.

The involvement of farmers and landowners is crucial to realising less intensive land use and reinstating traditional forms of management in the wider countryside, such as coppicing of woodland, which we are supporting by advising on the targeting of funding through the Government's Environmental Stewardship and England Woodland Grant Scheme.

We work with people furthermore to foster greater public understanding, enjoyment, access to and inspiration from a more natural landscape, and are keen to encourage increased provision of local 'sustainable' natural goods and services such as wood fuel and organic meat.

The West Weald is an incredible natural resource - Let's make the effort to better understand, enhance and enjoy it!

Discover The West Weald

The State of the West Weald's Natural Environment (2006)

Click to download Summary (pdf 325KB)