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AGI Cymru - Keynote - Dr Emyr Roberts
1. Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru
Natural Resources Wales
Emyr Roberts
Prif Weithredwr / Chief Executive
AGI Cymru 3rd December 2013
1
2. Who we are
• New body - 1st April 2013
• Welsh Government
sponsored body
• Sustainable
Development is our
central organising
principle
• 2,100 staff
• £179 million budget
• Our remit
2
3. Our purpose
To ensure natural resources of
Wales are sustainably maintained,
used and enhanced, now and in
the future
Our long-term goals:
• Enhancing our environment
• Protecting people
• Supporting enterprise and jobs
• Improving the nation’s health
• Vibrant and viable places
• Delivering social justice
• Supporting skills and knowledge
3
5. Ecosystem Services Approach
"a strategy for the integrated management of land, water
and living resources that promotes conservation and
sustainable use in an equitable way" (Convention on
Biological Diversity (CBD).
5
20. Environment Bill White Paper
• A requirement on NRW to develop and implement an
area-based approach for the sustainable development of
natural resources and to ensure evidence from this
process feeds into the appropriate delivery plans.
• A requirement for NRW to set out the priorities and
opportunities for the management of natural resources
on an area basis.
20
21. Conclusion
“It is our vision, where possible, to reuse the large quantities
of data that NRW collects (both manually and via telemetry
systems), making it available to external parties on both a
commercial and non-commercial basis. A data portal will be
created to provide online access via the browser to our data
catalogue.”
“GIS
specific data, should be shared in line with [AGI Cymru Location
Wales] which focuses particularly on sharing data, avoiding
duplication, providing more efficient services, promoting best practice
and having strong leadership.”
ICT Strategy, Natural Resources Wales
21
Notes de l'éditeur
Who we are?
We are a new body created on the 1st of April this year
We are a Welsh Government sponsored body…
..with Sustainable Development being our central organising principle
Creation of Natural Resources Wales from the three legacy bodies (Environment Agency Wales, Countryside Council for Wales and Forestry Commission Wales) makes us the largest Welsh Government Sponsored Body with over 2,000 staff.
We have an operating budget of £179 million for this financial year…
…and our remit is for the whole of Wales including the marine up to 12 nautical miles.
As we are the only organisation in the world which has such a unique mix of activities in terms of managing, protecting and using natural resources we have an opportunity to radically change the approach to natural resource management in Wales by taking an ecosystem approach
Our purpose is to ensure that Wales's natural resources are
sustainably maintained,
used
… and enhanced – both now and in the future.
Our aim is to improve the environmental, economic and social outcomes for Wales through the wide range of services and responsibilities we have.
Our long-term goals are:
Enhancing our environment
Protecting people
Supporting enterprise and jobs
Improving the nation’s health
Vibrant and viable places
Delivering social justice
Supporting skills and knowledge
Natural Resources Wales has many roles which include;
Adviser to Government - We are the principal adviser to the Welsh Government on the environment. Although we are a WG Sponsored Body we are an arms-length body (i.e. advise on policy, but don’t make policy. We are a delivery body).
Statutory consultee on planning – As well as response to national consultations we respond to over 9,000 planning applications each year
Designating authority – e.g. for Sites of Special Scientific Interest. We protect these important sites that make up 30% of Wales's land and waters – including:
73 national nature reserves (wildlife and natural e.g. geology features),
1 marine nature reserve (Skomer),
Over 1,000 Sites of Special Scientific Interest
10 ramsar sites (Wetlands),
92 special areas of conservation (designated under EU Habitats Directive) and
20 special protection areas (EU Birds Directive)
Environmental regulator - We regulate sectors including forestry, nuclear power stations, industrial premises, water companies and agriculture - making sure they meet high standards to protect local communities and the environment.
Permitting and licensing authority – We license activities that include water abstraction, flood defences and dredging. We issue over 10,000 permits, 65,000 fishing rod licences and 100 marine licences each year.
Land manager and owner – We manage 7% of the land area of Wales, including over 300,000 hectares of woodlands where we market over 825,000 tonnes of timber each year. We also maintain almost 2,000 miles of flood defences and more than 5,000 sluices, outfalls, floodgates and barriers in Wales to reduce the risk of flooding for over 65,000 homes
Operator – We operate five visitors centres, a laboratory in Llanelli and fish hatcheries
Provider of outdoor recreation – We are the biggest provider of outdoor recreation in Wales, with 550 kilometres of mountain bike trails, 135 kilometres of horse riding trails, 450 kilometres of walking trails and 75 picnic sites.
Incident management – We are a 24 hour emergency responder and deal with approximately 9,000 reported incidents a year that include flooded homes, polluted rivers and illegally dumped waste. We issue flood warnings directly to over 100,000 people to give them time to prepare themselves and their properties if the worst was to happen.
Evidence - We collect information on various environmental parameters and analyse the evidence base. For example;
We have mapped some of the ecosystem services for Wales such as water regulation.
We have monitored a site on Snowdon as part of a UK Environmental Change Network since 1995 as one of our long term datasets on climate change.
We have monitored all 1,600km of the coastline around Wales as part of our intertidal survey where we mapped over 55,000 hectares of intertidal habitat.
Central to the foundation of Natural Resources Wales is the proposal in the Welsh Government Green Paper on ‘Sustaining a Living Wales’ that a new approach be taken to environment management and regulation by moving to an ecosystem approach.
Adopting the ecosystem approach in Wales will mean considering and regulating the environment and its health as a whole, rather than dealing with individual aspects separately. It will mean weighing up and setting priorities for the many competing demands on our natural resources to provide different services to society.
As defined by the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Ecosystem Approach has twelve core principles, included in which is an approach based on spatial and temporal scale – placing spatial data at the centre of NRW’s foundation.
While embedding this approach will take years to fully implement, work is already being undertaken through various projects in the GIS and Remote Sensing environments within NRW to adopt this, including assessments of urban tree canopies, potential sites for wetland ecosystem development in urban and rural locales, and studies on access to green space.
We hold over 13 Terabytes of GIS data held in databases that feed software programs across the organisation and enable us to analyse spatial information.
As an example of the complexity of our information : In the case of the former Environment Agency Wales alone, more than 2,500 individual types of information support over 2,300 business processes . The information feeds just over 700 technology and information systems.
This information is procured by sampling and fields of expertise, for example through the automatic monitoring of rivers, and by processing external information that comes from our professional partners and others.We are currently analysing the former Forestry Commission Wales and Countryside Council for Wales; we are committed to the challenge of establishing information systems that will be suitable for the future.
In bringing together three organisations, Natural Resources Wales has also inherited three different sets of spatial and non spatial data, and three different groups of tools to view, analyse and maintain these data, including various desktop tools, web browsers and differing storage mechanisms.
All three legacy organisations have internal corporate map browsers, and an immediate challenge for the organisation is to bring together the functionality that all three of these systems, built on different technology - some proprietary and some open source – together, while not compromising accuracy or efficiency.
In addition to unifying data and systems held in the different legacy bodies, in the case of the former Environment Agency Wales and Forestry Commission Wales, much work has been done, and will continue to be needed to separate systems and datasets from the former parent bodies. This will necessitate the creation of a robust new centralised data store for Natural Resources Wales, and increase responsibility for capturing and maintaining datasets which have not been owned by Wales before.
Central to Flood Risk Management in Natural Resources Wales is a desire to increase data sharing, both with partner agencies and service providers including utility companies, but also to enhance the provision of data to the public, increasing awareness and preventing damage to life and property.
Key to providing quality information externally however, is a need to increase and maintain the accuracy of the data underlying knowledge about flood risk. Enhanced tools to replace legacy systems, in the form of AIMS (Asset Information Management System), which is increasingly being rolled out to multiple organisations.
Information to be supplied via ex Forestry Commission Wales.
Natural Resources Wales is responsible for licensing the abstraction of water from the environment. In the context of hydropower we must agree the amount of water a scheme can take from the river to flow through a hydropower turbine. To do this we grant water resources licences under the Water Resources Act 1991 (WRA), as amended by the Water Act 2003 (WA). We attach conditions to these licences, which set these flow parameters within a maximum flow that may be taken and a minimum flow, the Hands Off Flow (HOF) that must remain in the river channel. Between these upper and lower limits a proportion of the water may be taken.
Natural Resources Wales has undertaken a review of its abstraction guidance for hydropower which would see a change in the water available for a hydropower scheme. As part of this work we sought to assess the potential implications for renewable energy generation as a result of this change.
In order to help assess these implications, a tool has recently been created by GIS staff within NRW using the Detailed River Network (DRN) and a combination of LiDAR and Synthetic Aperture Radar data to give an automated highly accurate assessment of the nature of watercourse stretches where water is abstracted in one location, then discharged further downstream at a lower altitude in another, enabling a hydraulic head to be created. Between these two locations, a depleted reach is created where impacts on the ecosystem could be damaging if conditions are not correct. Higher gradient watercourses are less likely to contain species vulnerable to depletion in flow, and therefore allowances for abstractions are higher on tehse stretches.
The tool traces downstream from the nearest location on the DRN to desired distances of depleted reaches, and perform gradient and sinuosity calculations along these varied stretches.
It returns not only the overall gradient and elevation along the Depleted Reach length, but also the gradient changes every 5 metres. Rather than simply taking the elevation at the exact location of these 5 metre intervals, at each of these a 10m radial search around the point on the watercourse is done to pick out the lowest value, which is used to account for errors in the data potential rock outcrops or other landforms skewing results.
From the tool, altitude graphs, gradient change charts and GIS layers are created to enable a thorough analysis of the watercourse stretch.
NRW is a commercial operator producing 825,000 cubic meters of timber
Through the online esales product NRW Fulfils 300 tree harvesting contracts.
This facility allows contractors to visualise the contract area and to bid on the timber contract.
NRW is also a provider/enabler in the recreation sector
Examples include high ropes, Mountain bike hire, Forest holidays
Provides funding for our partners including small social enterprises an example of a social enterprise is Wisewoods Wales which works in a Welsh Government woodland near Aberystwyth – bringing the woodland back into management, making a range of goods to ensure a sustainable income and offering young trainees and volunteers accredited training towards paid or self-employment. Four Wisewoods volunteers have already gained Level 2 Awards in woodland management.
Wisewoods is now offering a local management service to small woodland owners.
We have begun to undertake a project to identify and map potential ANGS (Accessible Natural Green Space) sites in urban areas of Wales using available data sets (including those obtained by remote sensing, and Ordnance Survey (O/S) Master Map land use classification) and produce a database of potential ANGS sites by using the methodology from CCW’s accessible natural green space toolkit.
We want to take this one step further and build on the FCW work of using spatial analyst to map travel routes to accessible green space in and around communities. Ensuring accessible greenspace is within walking or cycling distance of communities is a crucial step in encouraging more frequent use of local green spaces.
Natural greenspaces have an important contribution to make to the quality of the environment and to the quality of life in and around communities. Such sites are valued by the community, provide important refuges for wildlife in otherwise impoverished areas, and are beneficial to public health and wellbeing. There are established mechanisms for the recognition, designation and protection of sites with special value for biodiversity, however there is no Wales-wide inventory of sites of importance for public access to green space.
Within the field of Access and Recreation too, Natural Resources Wales is seeking to build upon and enhance the work done by the legacy organisations in providing information publically to ease and enhance people’s access to the environment.
NRW already enable organisations, groups and individuals to use our forest recreation spatial data through our data download site – this allows others to promote and publicise NRW’s own recreation trails, routes and infrastructure.
Other recreation projects include the ForestXplorer Android and iOS applications developed by Forestry Commission Wales,
The Outdoor Wales OnLine map and Open Access Maps developed by CCW.
Natural Resources Wales is keen to develop not only the outward provision of mapping in this manner, but also to use this avenue as a mechanism for citizen engagement and the sourcing of local knowledge through citizen science.
Reporting on blocked footpaths, dumped cars or fly tipping could be a good use of citizen science.
In its strategy for woodlands and trees, Woodlands for Wales, the Welsh Government states its aim to ensure that woodlands and trees play a greater and more valued role in towns and cities, improving quality of life and surroundings for people who live in urban areas.
Natural Resources Wales been undertaking a comprehensive study of the tree canopy study in urban areas.
Wales is the first country in the world to undertake a complete spatial canopy cover study of all its urban areas
Urban trees have many vital roles in benefiting the healthy functioning of our towns and cities:
Creating attractive towns, encouraging inward investment and increasing property values as well as improving energy efficiency of buildings
Improving health and well-being by removing pollutants from the air, encouraging exercise and greater community cohesion, lowering crime levels and connecting people with nature
Countering the extremes of climate change, reducing flooding through intercepting rainfall and slowing storm water runoff, moderating temperature within the built environment and storing carbon.
While reporting on this project is still to be finalised, data from the study is already being used to inform maps and statistics provided in the Natural Resources Wales Local Evidence Packs.
Ecological connectivity is the ability of organisms and natural processes to move within the landscape.
It is therefore important for building the resilience of ecosystems.
To helps this we have been developing mapping for ecological connectivity.
these are also useful for exploring interactions between ecosystem services.
As an example, this slide shows the area southeast of Aberystwyth covering the Rheidol and Ystwyth catchments.
Urban land is shown in grey (Aberystwyth is the main area, with a scatter of villages).
Native woodland is shown in green, with designated areas in dark green.
These include The Rheidol Woods and Gorge SAC (top right) which is an internationally important area of upland oakwood, and a number of other SSSIs.
The green-brown colour shows a woodland network.
We are able to map these using a model derived from a former CCW, FCW and Forest Research project that predicts which woodland blocks are functionally connected (taking into account patch size, dispersal ability and relative use of intervening habitats by typical species).
Networks occur at many scales, but this is a selected priority network that indicates potential connectivity between designated areas. If we can target action such as woodland expansion, restoration, and general habitat improvement within this network we can improve the resilience of our best sites, and take them from being a collection of ‘islands’, to being the core areas of a functional network that provides greater resilience for the wider environment to issues such as climate change.
[BUT NOTE – the network is made up of a mosaic of woodland and other land uses – it helps suggest areas to target for planting, but is NOT a map of areas that should be completely covered in trees!]
This slide shows a flood risk map overlain in light blue – flooding is problem in this area, for example the serious floods in 2012.
Tree cover can help reduce the impact of floods, by slowing water movement down hillsides and along floodplains, and increasing infiltration into the soil.
By targeting woodland expansion within the priority network we could therefore both improve woodland resilience and contribute to reducing flood risk.
Also, woodland on floodplains is a rare and important habitat, and there could be substantial biodiversity gains by increasing its area.
There are also potential benefits for other ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, timber production and recreational opportunities.
The formation of Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru/ Natural Resources Wales provides many challenges both short and long term in bringing disparate data and software from the three legacy bodies together while retaining efficiency and integrity. However, this also brings with it many new opportunities to utilise a broader knowledge base, and through applying an ecosystem approach to tackle issues in new and innovative ways
Natural Resources Wales is committed to placing spatial data and the use of Geographic Information Systems at the heart of the organisation, seeing it as an important way in which information can be analysed and disseminated.
Indeed the ICT Strategy of Natural Resources Wales sets out a commitment to proactively sharing data externally, and with specific regard to GIS data, to work to achieve the objectives outlined in the AGI Location Wales Document.
The vision for geographic information in NRW is information is current, co-ordinated, properly stored, accessed and managed with relevant metadata.
This information is supported by a well led and co-ordinated team of spatial data specialists with the necessary skills and resource.
All users have knowledge and confidence in the data they access.