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A Living Wales – a new framework for our environment, our countryside and our seas

Introduction

It is four years since the Welsh Assembly Government published its landmark Environment Strategy for Wales. Set firmly within our commitment to delivering sustainable development, the strategy rightly stressed the value of the environment for its intrinsic worth; as our life support system; as a finite source of materials and resources, and as central to our quality of life, well-being and economy.

Over the past years we have made huge progress in implementing the approach set out in the 2006 Strategy:

• We have begun a major programme of resource efficiency investment moving us significantly towards zero waste.
• We have put in place actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with the guidance of our Wales Climate Change Commission.
• We have a new national flood programme and have refocused and increased investment.
• We have strengthened planning and partnerships for biodiversity.
• We are close to completing the all-Wales coastal path and have promoted water access, walking and cycling.
• We have gained significant new powers over marine planning, fisheries, environmental protection, nuisance and waste.
• We have invested in local environmental quality through the Tidy Towns initiative.

But one of the key sustainable development challenges of the 2006 strategy has largely eluded us, namely taking a truly integrated approach to the management of our environment which reflects the complexity of the way in which environmental systems interact, the value of the services they provide to society, the pressures posed by our changing climate, and the limits of natural capacity.

As a result of not being able to look at the environment as a whole, we have sometimes failed to find the appropriate approach to regulatory actions, have placed objectives too often in competition to each other, have pursued too narrow management measures, and been unclear as to which things we should give priority in a particular location. As we look at the progress against Wales’ sustainable development indicators, we can see symptoms of this lack of joined-up decisions - perhaps especially in our mixed progress in meeting our stated biodiversity goals. As we approach the world summit on biodiversity at Nagoya in November 2010, we believe it is time for a fresh approach.
Addressing this challenge is not easy as it requires us to make connections between a whole series of areas of work and regulatory regimes, management and funding.

We have begun to do this in our new land management scheme, ‘Glastir’, in developing our plans under the Water Framework Directive and Marine Spatial Planning, and in our Food and Woodland Strategies for Wales, each of which seeks to address multiple objectives at the same time and set priorities locally within a sustainability framework.

This consultation sets out the principles against which we will together develop this new approach and invites input to help to design how the new approach will be made operational. The final outcome of the work in 2011-12 will be a clear set of national priorities, backed up by institutional and regulatory changes and integrated local delivery mechanisms.

The new approach has benefitted from the input of a wide range of stakeholders over recent months in a series of meetings, workshops and discussions. We are very grateful for the time people and organisations have given us and for their continued commitment to work towards developing the details of future delivery.

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Living Wales - Consultation document

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