🦔 £79 Million for Nature — But What About Our Hedgehogs?
🦔 PETITION UPDATE: £79 MILLION FOR NATURE — LET’S MAKE SURE HEDGEHOGS BENEFIT
There is some encouraging news for nature today.
DEFRA has announced £79 million for local nature recovery across England, including £53 million to plant up to 500,000 trees and £26 million to support local authorities in delivering nature recovery and climate resilience.
For the UK’s hedgehogs, this investment could make a real difference — but only if nature recovery means reconnecting the landscapes they actually depend upon.
Hedgehogs don’t live their lives neatly inside nature reserves. They travel through our gardens, hedgerows, parks, field margins, verges and farmland, often covering considerable distances each night looking for food and mates.
That means a beautiful new pocket of habitat isn’t enough if a hedgehog cannot safely reach it.
We need connected wildlife corridors, restored hedgerows, accessible gardens and developments designed so wildlife can move through them. And we must protect the valuable habitat we already have rather than destroying it and promising to create nature somewhere else.
This is particularly important as thousands of new homes are planned across the country. Nature recovery and development must work together from the beginning — not leave wildlife trying to negotiate an increasingly fragmented landscape afterwards.
So I welcome this investment. But I’ll be watching what happens next.
£79 million announced is not the measure of success. More thriving wildlife is.
And funding habitat recovery does not remove the need to strengthen the law.
Britain’s hedgehogs still deserve the additional legal protection we’re campaigning for under Schedule 5 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.
🦔 Please keep signing and sharing our petition. The more voices behind it, the harder it becomes to ignore.
Protect Britain's Hedgehogs 👉🏻🦔https://www.change.org/p/hedgehogs-need-more-than-public-love-they-need-legal-protection
Restore habitat. Reconnect our countryside. Protect what remains. Give hedgehogs a future. 💚🦔
💧 Remember to water your wildlife.