From the red deer of Dartmoor, along our meandering rivers, past historic coastal communities, to the diversity of our marine environment stretching beyond Lundy Island, our UNESCO biosphere reserve celebrates life by recognising the connections between people and nature.
As part of the global UNESCO MAB network, our biosphere provides an open forum for bringing people together with their natural surroundings - to empower them to unlock their potential, and using their local and scientific knowledge to model solutions for sustainable living. We seek to inspire people to establish new, meaningful connections to their environment and share a way of living with nature that builds a positive future we can be proud of.
People living in this landscape can demonstrate their way of living with nature through several different projects, all contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals.
We have launched the Natural Capital Marketplace, an online trading platform connecting landowners with new project options they can implement on their land that diversify income and help nature recover. These projects redirect public/private investment into our local nature-based projects, aiding nature recovery and stimulating economic development, creating good quality jobs and community wealth building.
North Devon is also a vibrant landscape for scientific research, with close relationships with multiple world-class academic institutions. For example, we hosted two of the four ‘Pioneer’ programmes that underpin the UK’s Government’s new 25 Year Environment Plan, helping to create a framework for sustainable land management. One current research project, Smart Biosphere, seeks to implement an environmental intelligence platform at a catchment scale, using remote IoT sensors, big data and machine learning to improve agricultural practices, reduce pollution and sequester carbon.