We recently received an inquiry from a partner organisation about what measures they could take to improve the green spaces they manage from a carbon reduction perspective.
The green spaces we keep can aid a helping hand in negating some of the emissions we produce by taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They’re also invaluable in ensuring that local wildlife has plenty of habitation space and on top of all that, they just look nice!
Our colleague Roe has been doing some digging and unearthed a few resources that anyone who’s looking to make a bigger environmental impact with their green spaces could make use of and we thought they were too good not to share.
Firstly, we’re talking hedgerows. This article in the Guardian illustrates the astounding benefits that our 500,000km of hedgerows does for the biodiversity of the UK and how this can help us reach net zero.
Next, meadow planting is similarly rife with benefits for biodiversity (especially that of invertebrates) as well as combining the forces of not buying annual plants grown in peat-based compost (a huge market that has a detrimental impact on precious peat resources and carbon sequestration) and the lack of pesticides and fertilisers in a natural meadow.
This concise read demonstrates the myriad of benefits the movement to restore Britain’s meadows could bring.
This piece in Plantlife, a very useful resource in itself, goes into the reasoning behind finding alternatives to peat-based compost to limit the damage done to our carbon sequestration and also how your favourite plants are unlikely to need them anyway.
Anyone looking for practical experience completed recently need look no farther than Newcastle City Council’s report on managing urban meadows. This doesn’t go into detail on carbon but contains a lot of useful info on specific plants and management guidance.
Finally, there’s plenty of useful info at Magnificent Meadows which contains sets of resources for whatever your green goals are.
We hope that this information can prove useful to anyone who is thinking about how to maximise their green spaces potential for environmental conservation and huge thanks to Roe for pulling together all these resources!