Pathfinder Parks: Implementing a common framework to track & accelerate progress towards Net Zero in the South Downs National Park using the OnePlanet Platform.

Protected Landscapes - National Parks and AONBs - are the UK's 'green lungs', providing a vital public service to help people access the countryside and protect and enhance our cherished landscapes and wildlife. They form a lynchpin of the UK's ambitious nature recovery and climate change targets, with significant capacity to store carbon and provide other ecosystem services, such as natural flood risk management.

The South Downs National Park is the most populated National Park in the UK, with 117,000 residents and 2.2m living within 10km of our boundary. The South Downs stretch 100 miles across the counties of Hampshire, East & West Sussex, including 12 Districts and Boroughs, 176 Towns and Parishes. Over 18.8m people visit the Downs each year and the National Park is home to over 8,000 businesses, employing 54,000 people.

Unsurprisingly, the South Downs has the highest net greenhouse gas emissions of any UK National Park, at 2,077,579t/year. But with so many public, private and community-sector stakeholders, we need the tools to enable everyone to work together to move rapidly towards Net-Zero. To date, this has been a considerable challenge, with different organisations using different methods and indicators to plan, deliver and track their progress, making collaboration and knowledge-sharing tricky and time-consuming and making it difficult to understand how local action contributes to national targets.

Thanks to Innovate UK funding, we have successfully demonstrated how the [OnePlanet][0] 'Ecosystem' digital infrastructure can meet this need in the South Downs National Park, bringing together different organisations' strategies and action plans in one easy-to-use tool, identifying shared outcomes and tracking activity through shared indicators that comply with the Paris Climate Change Agreement. The pilot also highlighted how it could free up staff time and improve the flow of funding to projects.

Our Pathfinder Project will see us extend use of OnePlanet across the National Park, to support strategic planning and project management and build on learning from the pilot to fully exploit the potential of the platform to drive collaboration - accelerating the pace of Net-Zero activity and delivery of nature-based solutions at landscape-scale.

We will continue to support and develop the local authority and sector/community-level engagement that was established through the pilot and involve a wider constituency of local authority partners, with a particular focus on integrating [Local nature recovery strategies][1] and Net-Zero; sustainable food systems and agriculture and peer-to-peer learning between local authorities.

[0]: https://oneplanet.com/ [1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-nature-recovery-strategies/local-nature-recovery-strategies