Why top 10 green city aim isn’t wildly overambitious

In Marketing Derby’s latest edition of Innovate Magazine, we meet Jo Smith from Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, an organisation which is challenging Derby to become a UK top 10 green city.

According to research conducted by the University of Sheffield, which analysed 68 places across England, Scotland and Wales and ranked them based on tree cover, vegetation and parks in their city centres, Derby currently sits 22nd in a league table topped by Exeter and dominated by areas in the south.

Jo, who is chief executive at Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, wants to see Derby move up that table – and elevate itself into the top 10.

She told Innovate: “I’m a great believer in having big, bold targets that make us all think differently because it’s not good enough to carry on doing what we were doing or to just do a little bit more of it.

“That won’t be enough to tip the balance in wildlife’s favour. We have to come up with transformational actions which really ensure that Derby changes the way it thinks about wildlife and wild spaces.”

Derbyshire Wildlife Trust develops ambitious, transformational projects to undo decades of damage inflicted by society on the natural world.

And its impressive achievements are helping to inspire further momentum.

The trust has established six major landscape recovery areas, assisting rewilding in the north, establishing new wetlands in the south and giving nature a helping hand in the urban and former industrial areas in between.

It has successfully reintroduced beavers into South Derbyshire and seen them produce young here for the first time in 800 years.

It has encouraged bitterns, once extinct in the UK, to breed in the county for the first time on record.

And it has embarked on the UK’s largest urban rewilding project, to turn the once manicured Allestree Park and golf course into a rich natural habitat of woodland, scrub and wildflower meadows.

The work is part of the trust’s aim to see a third of all land in Derbyshire managed for wildlife by 2030 and to persuade one-in-four people to act as advocates for nature in the same timeframe.

Jo told Innovate: “We’re doing some research about how we could get to be a top ten or top five city. What would that look like? What would it need to allow Derby to paint that picture of it being one of the greenest cities in the UK?

“It feels like a realistic prospect. There is already a coming together of thoughts and minds about making Derby a better place.

“It feels like there is momentum around that, so we hope to encourage Derby to improve its existing green spaces, to create new green spaces and to rewild that river corridor and, so far, it seems to be a very positive vision that many people agree with and support.”

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