Killterton, in Devon, a National Trust landscape – credit: Clive Nichols, National Trust

This year marks the 130th anniversary of the founding of the UK’s national preservation society, called the National Trust, and to mark the occasion they’re setting a goal which they make no bones about calling a “moonshot.”

The trust has always stepped up to face the challenges of the day, whether that’s saving a crumbling heritage building or funding an important treasure purchase for a museum, but its new goal is to restore over half a million acres of natural spaces, equivalent to one-and-a-half-times the size of the Greater London Area.

That’s more than 10 times the amount of land restored by the trust over the past decade, but the charity’s director general, Hilary McGrady, says the decline of natural spaces on the island merits an “audacious” effort.

“For 130 years, the National Trust has responded to the crises and challenges of the time. Today, nature is declining before our eyes and climate change is threatening homes and habitats on a colossal scale. We will ramp up our work to restore nature, both on our own land and beyond our boundaries,” she said.

At precisely 617,000 acres, the trust will look to private landowners and communities to carry out much of the restoration work; it alone doesn’t own enough degraded land to meet such a large goal.

Rather than restore individual patches of land, the trust wants to help reconnect wider landscapes together in a varied mosaic of rich and resilient natural habitat. Harry Bowell, the trust’s director of land and nature, gave the example of the Lunt Farm in Liverpool, a recent acquisition very much informed by this 617,000-acre objective.

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90,000 native trees will be planted across the degraded farm which will connect it to the Mersey Forest network, allowing native wildlife species to better disperse across the land.

Another example are the Shropshire Hills, where GNN reported a restoration project was carried out on several degraded meadows to restore them to flowering glory and better provide connective habitat for the species that live on the hills themselves.

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Bowell told the Guardian that the project was a “moonshot” but one he and his colleagues think is practically achievable “because of the mapping we’ve done.”

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