Alistair Griffiths, Director of Science and Collections at the RHS, comments on the Government’s Environmental Improvement Plan for 2023 launched today: “It’s a huge missed opportunity that the UK’s army of 30 million gardeners, and the 655,000 hectares gardens represent, aren’t central to the government’s drive to champion nature in the Environmental Improvement Plan.
“We know that gardens promote biodiversity and can help us to be more climate resilient, for example by reducing flood risk, cooling in summer and capturing pollutants, as well as benefitting health and wellbeing. What we need to see is a greater investment in R&D funding for the role gardens and cultivated plants can and will play over the coming decades, strict planning requirements with regard to the provision of green space including more support for preventing front gardens from being paved over, and learning and development to build green skills and ensure that these all-important cultivated plots of land can be properly protected for the future.”
