A new Edinburgh Biodiversity Action Plan for 2016 to 2018 has been approved by the Council’s Corporate Policy and Strategy Committee.
Edinburgh’s unique geology creates a very special natural environment and helps to bring biodiversity right into the heart of the city. Our location between the Pentland Hills and Firth of Forth gives us a wide variety of important habitats, including the coastal areas which are of global importance for some birds species in winter.
The plan is delivered by the Edinburgh Biodiversity Partnership. The Partnership has over 30 members. Led by the Council’s Planning and Transport Service, partners have worked hard in recent months to produce this fourth Edinburgh Biodiversity Action Plan. It contains over 250 actions and reflects all of the exciting collaborative work planned for the next three years. Engagement with stakeholders and local communities continues to be at the heart of the Plan.
For the first time, the Plan contains specific actions relating to the built environment. This reflects an increasing recognition of the relationship between the built and natural environments, in relation to climate change mitigation, green infrastructure and the water environment in particular. There are also sections on Green and Blue Networks (connected water habitats – rivers, ponds, lochs and sea), Geodiversity (rocks, minerals, sediments and soils) and Species.
A celebration and launch event is planned during Edinburgh Biodiversity Week (21 – 29 May 2016). For more information contact us at biodiversity@edinburgh.gov.uk
Planning Edinburgh 
The document was quite a bit of a read, but can I applaud the increasing maturity with which you are getting to grips with the task. Hopefully expertise will build up year-on-year.
Some thoughts came to mind.
* Perhaps you could have an email list (or facebook page) which keeps us abreast with progress on the different actions outlined.
* In terms of locally sourcing seeds, there will be a number of botanically-aware individuals all around Edinburgh, and if you simply liaised with them with what was needed, they could collect seeds locally where they live and drop them off somewhere when they are passing the city centre.
Cheers,
David Merrick
Hi David, thanks for the feedback.
We’ll be producing updates as we progress the Action Plan and you can email us at biodiversity@edinburgh.gov.uk to join our email list. We don’t have a FaceBook page at the moment but may do this in the future. In the meantime, we’ll do our best to keep the blog up to date with what’s happening.
Our Rare Plants project already collects seeds from some of our very rare species and there are also specialist providers of local provenance seeds for meadow creation etc. We’ve no plans at the moment for city wide seed collection but it could be a good idea for the future to collect local native seeds for specific projects.