The Annual Forum is an opportunity to find out about some of the recent and upcoming work of the AONB Partnership staff team and to discuss matters relating to the future well-being of our natural land cultural heritage. Last year was the first time we’ve not held the forum since 2004, and this year we are holding an online event – there won’t be the opportunity to see some of the work in the field, but we hope we’ll still be able to show you much of what’s going on, albeit virtually.

This year there’ll be presentations on some major areas of current work – from our hugely successful peatland programme, to ecological restoration at Estate level, to landscape-scale nature recovery and public engagement projects, our Farming in Protected Landscapes programme, and some of our interpretation and education work. Though it’s a webinar format, and sadly we won’t see you, there’ll still be an opportunity to put questions to the team using the webinar’s Q&A function, and dig a bit deeper into the work and its benefits and challenges.

For the first time this year, we’ll be bringing in a panel from around the country to discuss the challenges we face in bringing about large-scale ecological restoration in the face of a global climate and ecological crisis. The panel will include Sarah Mukherjee (writer, broadcaster and Chief Executive of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment); Liz Newton, (a Director at Natural England); Steve Trotter (Chief Executive of Cumbria Wildlife Trust and Vice Chair of the Partnership); Rebecca Wrigley (Chief Executive of Rewilding Britain).

We will have a guest panel discussion about the prospects for nature recovery in the uplands, followed by an opportunity to join in a moderated question and answer session with the panel.

Pendlebury Award
In 2020 we couldn’t give out our Pendlebury Award, celebrating a person or group that has done great work for conserving the AONB or helping people to discover what makes it special. This year we’ll be able to make the award, which is given in memory of the Partnership’s first chair Bob Pendlebury.