Evenlode Landscape Recovery hits the big screen at BFI Southbank
Last week, the Evenlode Landscape Recovery project made it onto the big screen, with the premiere of Corridors of Finance: The Evenlode Landscape Recovery Blueprint at BFI Southbank in London.
Created by Corridors of Finance, the film tells the story of the Evenlode Landscape Recovery project and explores a much bigger question: how can nature finance work at the scale needed to deliver meaningful change across a whole landscape?
Members of the Cluster and ELR team travelled to London for the screening, alongside some of the farmers involved in making the project happen on the ground. With around 100 guests from across farming, finance, business and the environment, it was a chance to share what is happening here in the Evenlode and put it at the heart of a much wider conversation.
Making nature finance tangible
Nature finance can be a complicated subject. But at its heart is a relatively simple challenge: how can investment in things such as cleaner water, reduced flood risk, healthier soils, more wildlife and greater resilience create reliable, long-term opportunities for the farmers and land managers delivering them?
The Evenlode Landscape Recovery project provides a real landscape in which to explore that question. Across more than 3,000 hectares and over 50 farms, the project is looking at how changes including reconnecting rivers with their floodplains, creating wetlands and meadows, planting and restoring hedgerows and woodland, and improving soil health can be delivered alongside food production.
The film brings that story to life through the landscape itself and, importantly, through the farmers and people involved.
Thinking beyond individual farms
One of the strongest themes to emerge from the screening and discussion afterwards was scale.
Rivers, wildlife, flooding and water quality don't follow farm boundaries. Achieving meaningful change therefore requires people to work across farms, businesses and catchments, and potentially enables investment to work at that larger scale too.
As one of the messages shared during the evening cleaverly put it:
“One field is charity, a landscape is an investment, a country is a market.”
There was also plenty of discussion about collaboration: bringing together farmers and landowners with businesses, investors, government and other organisations, and finding models where the benefits of working collectively can outweigh what any one organisation could achieve alone.
There is still plenty to work through. But seeing the Evenlode used as a practical example of what could be possible made for an optimistic and thought-provoking evening.
And, on a slightly less serious note, it was also a rare opportunity to get almost the whole Cluster and ELR team off the farm tracks and out of the Cotswolds for an evening together!
Watch the Trailer below:
Comments