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 brings 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 aim to agree what sort of future we all, collectively, want for the Quantocks. 

The first workshop was held in December 2021, with a the web-based wider public consultation and a follow up workshop in October 2022. It is important that we bring people together even if they may start with very different views, so we have 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. If you want to have a look at what the first workshop discussed, you can download the summary here.

We’ll be reporting back after the October workshop, and are aiming to have a “roadmap” to achieve a shared vision for the future. We see this influencing policy and decision making through things like the AONB Management Plan and local development plans as well as helping to inform individual’s decisions.