STAND team travel to the Elan Valley, Wales, for the next stakeholder workshop

This September, the STAND team were in the Elan Valley in Wales to conduct the next stakeholder workshop, this time for the Elenydd landscape. We welcomed local rangers from Natural Resources Wales, Elan Valley Trust and Dwr Cymru Welsh Water, alongside local NGOs, land managers and local community groups. As with our earlier workshop in the North Pennines and Yorkshire Dales, this session was designed to understand local stakeholders’ interests, preferences and their ambitions for different land uses and treescape approaches.

Welcoming local stakeholders to the STAND project

Break-out groups discussing the benefits the Eleyndd landscape provides

Now we have completed our first workshops in each of our case study landscapes, the team will spend the winter reviewing stakeholder values and creating each groups vision as a spatially explicit scenario model. Next year we will be returning to each area to present these scenarios back to the group, discussing trade-offs and synergies between different scenarios and ambition levels. Our team members at Cardiff University will also be conducting a series of one to one interviews over autumn and winter with stakeholders and actors at different scales, from local to regional and national, for a deeper dive into barriers and delivery mechanisms.

STAND team take a trip around the Elenydd to better understand the character of the landscape