NRW New Outdoor Recreation Strategy for Wales

Huge Response Received to help NRW develop a New Outdoor Recreation Strategy in Wales

The Pembrokeshire Coastal Forum’s (PCF) Stakeholder Manager Tom Luddington and the wider PCF team have been working with Natural Resources Wales (NRW) to engage with people across Wales, and further afield, to help design a new Outdoor Recreation Strategy for the land under the care of NRW – which amounts to roughly 7% of Wales – over 130,000 hectares of land.

The stakeholder engagement process has been a great success so far allowing for more than 4000 people to provide their ideas, concerns, support, and input for the new strategy.

The strategy hopes to answer the question: ‘What is the future of outdoor recreation on the land cared for by Natural Resources Wales (NRW), considering the climate and nature emergencies, sustainability, and the well-being of future generations?’

PCF joined NRW to help facilitate multiple workshops across Wales, including a workshop for Chairs of all the Local Access Forums in Wales, and online focus groups to develop ideas for the strategy.

Following this, NRW and PCF worked with partners to invite over 250 representative organisations and key stakeholders to complete an online survey to inform the strategy development. This survey was shared widely, and we received 3465 responses to the survey, of which over 100 were from organisations and 3365 were from individuals representing the whole outdoor recreation sector and a wide variety user groups. 

Dawn Thompson who is leading the project for NRW said:

“We are really pleased to have had such a huge response for the workshops, focus groups and online survey. It shows the true importance of recreation on land under the care of NRW and has provided valuable insight from a wide variety of user groups, individuals, and organisations to help NRW develop the new strategy. The strategy will really help evolve how we work in partnership with others to effect change and drive positive outcomes in outdoor recreation for the future.”

During the next phase, NRW will use all the feedback received to create the strategy which will set a vision to 2050 for outdoor recreation on land cared for by NRW and highlight priority areas for focus to 2030 in line with the current NRW Corporate Plan – Nature and People Thriving Together.