This is perhaps one of our more challenging ideas. 

What future do we want for the Quantocks? We can be sure that change will continue whether we like it or not. This project bought a wide range of people together to chart a course that embraces the future but preserves the best of our inheritance. Climate change, a changing agricultural economy, different environmental and recreational expectations; if we want to influence the forces driving these changes and make informed decisions for the future this is the time to do so. Through a series of workshops and a wider public consultation we aimed to agree what sort of future we all, collectively, want for the Quantocks. 

The first workshop was held in December 2021, with a web-based wider public consultation and a follow up workshop in October 2022. It was important that we brought people together even if they may have started with very different views, so we commissioned an internationally award winning team of specialist environmental facilitators, Dialogue Matters, to help us reach a common view and chart a route map to the future.

This ambitious project didn’t manage to reach the consensus we were hoping for, but there was nonetheless a good measure of agreement about what people value and how it might be conserved for the future. The results will influence policy development and decision making through things like the National Landscape Management Plan and local development plans, as well as helping to inform individual’s decisions.