Good quality Green Infrastructure has an important role to play in our urban and rural environments for improving health and wellbeing, air quality, nature recovery and resilience to and mitigation of climate change, along with addressing issues of social inequality and environmental decline.
“Green Infrastructure is a network of multi-functional green and blue spaces and other natural features, urban and rural, which is capable of delivering a wide range of environmental, economic, health and wellbeing benefits for nature, climate, local and wider communities and prosperity.”
National Planning Policy Framework, 2021.
Natural England have recently launched a new Green Infrastructure Framework to help local planning authorities and developers to consider Green Infrastructure in local plans and in new development. The Framework can also support better planning for higher quality Green Infrastructure, and help to target the creation or improvement of it, particularly where existing provision is poorest.
The Framework has also been developed to enable other organisations and groups such as parks and greenspace managers and local communities to think more about Green Infrastructure and plan for its creation or improvement.
The new framework also includes a freely available tool providing GI Mapping layers and analyses. The England-wide Green Infrastructure mapping database brings together data from around 50 sources of environmental and socio-economic data. It will provide an England level baseline and assist local authorities and other stakeholders to assess green infrastructure provision against the emerging GI Standards.
