The competition for expressions of interest for the second stage of the evidence base development closed on 23 May 2006. See "Development of the Evidence Base for Natural Environment Policy".

Our natural environment, including biodiversity, is vital to human health and wellbeing. It provides:

The sustainable use of our natural environment also plays a fundamental role in alleviating poverty in developing countries. Over 90% of the 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty depend on forests for some part of their livelihood and 75% of the world’s population rely on traditional medicines derived from natural sources for their primary health care.

"working to develop a more strategic approach"

We are currently working to develop a more strategic approach to conserving, enhancing and managing the natural environment both at home and abroad.

Our first step was to work with stakeholders to define a vision that will help set out the reasons why the natural environment is important. We held several stakeholder workshops early in 2005 to help draft and test initial ideas for a vision. Then we invited comments on a revised draft via our online comment forum (you can still see the comments we received on the open forum pages). We are now working to revise the vision and aim to publish it soon.

Further detail on specific aspects of our work can be found on these pages. If you have any questions about our work, that are not answered on this website, please email us at ELMgeneral@defra.gsi.gov.uk.