The Wildlife Trusts are a grassroots movement of people from a wide range of backgrounds and all walks of life, who believe that we need nature and nature needs us. We have more than 944,000 members, over 38,000 volunteers, 3,600 staff and 600 trustees. There are 46 individual Wildlife Trusts, each of which is a place-based independent charity with its own legal identity, formed by groups of people getting together and working with others to make a positive difference to wildlife and future generations, starting where they live and work.
Every Wildlife Trust is part of The Wildlife Trusts federation and a corporate member of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts, a registered charity in its own right founded in 1912 and one of the founding members of IUCN – the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Taken together this federation of 47 charities is known as The Wildlife Trusts.
The next few years will be critical in determining what kind of world we all live in. We need to urgently reverse the loss of wildlife and put nature into recovery at scale if we are to prevent climate and ecological disaster. We recognise that this will require big, bold changes in the way The Wildlife Trusts work, not least in how we mobilise others and support them to organise within their own communities.
The Landscape Recovery team was set up as a response to the urgency of the inextricably linked nature and climate emergencies. The purpose of this team is to encourage and facilitate cross-Wildlife Trust action on landscape scale recovery, inject the rewilding approaches into the work of the Wildlife Trusts, coordinate land management activities where scale-economies are clear and to substantially increase funding for nature's recovery across the Wildlife Trusts. The team is developing a range of programmes where RSWT acts as a 'collective vehicle' for groups of Trusts. For example, RSWT is leading a programme of peatland restoration through the Precious Peatlands project. Opportunities for such programmes are increasing – the UK is at a tipping point where either wildlife continues to decline or we finally grasp the opportunities of nature's recovery.