Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts

The Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts (RSWT) is the central charity which supports the federation of 46 independent Wildlife Trusts working for nature’s recovery across the UK. The Wildlife Trusts’ vision is of a thriving natural world, with abundant wildlife and healthy natural habitats playing a valued role in addressing the climate and ecological emergencies, and everyone inspired to take action for nature’s recovery.

Collectively, The Wildlife Trusts look after over 2,300 nature reserves, operate 123 visitor and education centres and own 29 working farms. The role of RSWT is to ensure a strong voice for wildlife at a UK level, supporting the individual Wildlife Trusts to be a strong force for nature in their local areas and to work together to achieve even greater impact as a collective.

The Wildlife Trusts are on a mission to bring about a people-powered nature and climate recovery by empowering people to take meaningful action for nature, and to create an inclusive society where nature matters to everyone, everywhere. As a strategic partner, RSWT used our funding to develop the nature recovery network needed to reverse nature’s decline in two critical areas:

• Protecting and expanding nature reserves through green finance mechanisms, unlocking more funding to permanently protect and manage more land.
• Changing Britain’s dominant land use – agriculture – into a nature-restoring practice, rather than a nature-harming one. Expert advice is vital to help farmers transition to regenerative farming and our funding is helping to expand, professionalise, upskill and co-ordinate the service, including helping farmers utilise new environmental land management schemes.

Our funding enabled The Wildlife Trusts to hire two new posts: a Green Finance Manager and a Land Advice Services Manager. Both positions are helping to improve both practice and delivery across the Wildlife Trusts network.

The Green Finance work has been hugely successful, helping individual Trusts to understand Biodiversity Net Gain, which is now a legal requirement in England, as well as explore other green finance mechanisms.

The Land Advice Service Manager is providing important additional capacity to scale up and coordinate land advisory services across the 46 Wildlife Trusts. Through a land management community of practice across this new role is enabling the Wildlife Trusts to expand their relationships with landowners and support farmers to transition to approaches which support wildlife’s recovery.