Naturally Birmingham is now a forum for Birmingham City Council’s City of Nature Plan

It keeps people’s views and values at it’s heart while helping to develop new approaches to the provision, maintenance and use of the city’s green spaces by sharing information and proving spaces for communication.

The Naturally Birmingham Project was Birmingham’s delivering of the first phase of the UK’s national Future Parks Accelerator (FPA) Project funded through the National Lottery Heritage Fund and supported by the National Trust.

Although the co-design phase of the FPA completed at the end of June 2022 the transition phase was a follow on project called the Urban Nature Development (UND) Project. The UND project comes to a close on 31st March 2025.

The Naturally Birmingham forum website will continue with a focus of sharing information that can help bring nature to everyone’s doorstep through the delivering of the aims of the City of Nature Plan.

The UND project delivered 4 creative, ambitious, and inclusively designed projects that not only help to deliver the city of Nature Plan in Birmingham but will also help others to understand the key issues, challenges, and opportunities when it comes to ‘levelling up’ access to green space and nature and deliver nature-based solutions to climate change in urban areas.

The four projects were:

• The production of a high level biophilic green infrastructure (GI) masterplan with a pipeline of projects for the East Birmingham Inclusive Growth Corridor.

• The creation of a Birmingham City Council Schedule of Sites that could successfully benefit from future Biodiversity Net Gain credits and embedded maintenance payments by: identification of BCC owned sites against the 25-year nature recovery vision map developed through FPA, assessing the habitat across all existing city owned green space.

• The establishment of mechanisms for Birmingham residents to become involved with green spaces and nature on their doorstep.

• The creation of a new way of working (Delivery Model) between the Council (internal to BCC) and the people of Birmingham (External to BCC) to deliver Green Infrastructure and Nature Recovery as part of the City of Nature Plan developed through FPA.