Evidence for nature recovery

DOI: https://doi.org/10.58248/PN767

What is nature recovery?

The term ‘nature recovery’ is a central theme of UK environmental strategies and legislation. Natural England describes, ‘recovering nature’ as ‘restoring and enhancing the ecosystems that enable wildlife and people to thrive in a growing population'.

This briefing focuses on frameworks for nature recovery in England, which include the 25-Year Environment Plan, Local Nature Recovery Strategies and Biodiversity Net Gain established under the Environment Act 2021 and Environmental Delivery Plans established under the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025. The plans are landscape-scale actions to address specific environmental impacts on protected sites or species.

All these measures aim to increase biodiversity. However, recent assessments suggest England is “largely off track” to meet most environmental commitments, with overall species loss and habitat degradation yet to be reversed.

Evidence in nature recovery decision-making

Nature recovery decision-making draws on expert knowledge, scientific research, technical grey literature (for example, reports not published in academic journals) and environmental data. Effective decision-making often requires combining and assessing these sources across different ecosystems and spatial scales to develop the required evidence base.

Different types of evidence are required to address the various causes of biodiversity loss, which differ in time and spatial scales, such as the global impacts of climate change and the local and regional impacts of habitat loss.

The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 says that when designing Environmental Delivery Plans “Natural England or the Secretary of State must take account of the best available scientific evidence”.

Contributors to this POSTnote (including academics, nature recovery practitioners, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and regulatory bodies) agree that evidence-based decision-making is essential for improving the effectiveness of nature recovery actions across terrestrial and aquatic environments.

Contributors generally agreed that a pathway is needed to ensure and demonstrate the success of nature recovery initiatives. This includes early community engagement, targeted spatial planning, co-design of actions and adaptive management supported by monitoring and evaluation.

Data presence, access and quality

Data can be a form of evidence once it is appropriately processed and validated. There are usually pathways to translate data into useful types of evidence for decision making. However, contributors raised concerns about environmental data fragmenting across multiple repositories and organisations with different licences and a lack of direct investment in the data infrastructure by the government, which creates inconsistencies in standards and accessibility.

Biodiversity monitoring data in the UK is collected for multiple regulatory uses, such as international and national biodiversity targets. Most of the terrestrial biodiversity data for these uses is collected by skilled volunteers (‘citizen scientists’).

While there is collaboration through the National Biodiversity Network (a biodiversity information-sharing network), there is no public investment in much of this infrastructure. There are initiatives such as collaborative evidence databases and quality, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (QFAIR) data standards, but organisations may have limited resources to make changes. Contributors noted that such initiatives are yet to be universally adopted, and that biodiversity monitoring data management is becoming more complex particularly due to the increasing volume of new data types.

The government has several initiatives to encourage private sector investors to pay landowners to conserve natural environments. However, the private sector often has different data-collection requirements and commercial data may not be openly available.

Contributors recommended designing clearer pathways for data management or a formal recognition scheme for open data.

Collaboration, co-design and trust

Contributors said that increasing long-term policy stability will help to develop shared nature-recovery goals. Early community engagement and co-designing nature recovery actions with affected parties may help to reduce conflict and improve trust.

Contributors generally supported neutral convening bodies to act as facilitators for credible and impartial nature recovery decision-making at the local or landscape scale.

Implementation, evaluation and monitoring

Practitioners often rely on non-statutory guidance documents or expert advice to translate evidence into action. Producing and keeping guidance up to date is resource intensive. Moreover, researchers found that many guidance documents do not provide relevant reference(s) to justify recommended actions. Contributors suggested creating a centralised body responsible for synthesising and translating nature-recovery evidence into practical, evidence-based guidance.

Monitoring the state of the environment before and after nature-recovery actions improves understanding of their effectiveness. Contributors recommended adaptive management approaches that collect baseline data, monitor impacts (using robust study designs) and adjust actions accordingly.

Time, training and funding constraints often restricts practitioners’ abilities to evaluate research or monitor project outcomes. However, if nature recovery projects engage communities this may include co-designing and participating in citizen science monitoring to help assess these projects’ effectiveness.

Advances in monitoring technologies may enable more efficient evidence collection but also generate large amounts of data that must be verified and interpreted. Researchers suggest that artificial intelligence and machine learning may help analyse, collate and synthesise evidence, but emphasise the need for transparency and human oversight. New metrics to understand ecosystem resilience may be required given climate and environmental change.

Acknowledgements

This briefing was produced in consultation with experts and stakeholders, who are listed at the end of the briefing. It was co-funded by the British Ecological Society. POST would like to thank everyone who contributed their expertise.