Quantock Hills. An Area of Outstanding Beauty

You are an integral part of nature: your fate is tightly linked with biodiversity, the huge variety of other animals and plants, the places they live and their surrounding environments, all over the world.

You rely on this diversity of life to provide you with the food, fuel, medicine and other essentials you simply cannot live without. Yet this rich diversity is being lost at a greatly accelerated rate because of human activities. This impoverishes us all and weakens the ability of the living systems, on which we depend, to resist growing threats such as climate change.

2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, and people all over the world are working to safeguard this irreplaceable natural wealth and reduce biodiversity loss. This is vital for current and future human wellbeing. We need to do more. Now is the time to act.

Our Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (along with the National Parks) are just that!  They contain this country’s finest landscapes and countryside and are home to some of our most exquisite and unusual wildlife species.

They are protected landscapes, managed through local partnerships on behalf of the nation and Biodiversity is a part of what makes these landscapes special.  It is not a case of biodiversity or landscape.

The protected landscape approach emphasises the integration of humans and nature, rather than the isolation of one from the other.  It presents an opportunity to understand better the relationship between people and their environment and recognises that to conserve biodiversity in many parts of the world we must also pay attention to cultural diversity.

AONBs work at the landscape scale.  This, however, is not synonymous with large-scale habitat restoration. It is an approach that goes to the heart of our relationship with the environment.  It relies on an understanding of our place within the environment, our impact upon it, and the processes that operate within it.  It is an approach that is focused on sustainability.

The family of AONBs supports the aims of the International Year of Biodiversity.

There area 47 AONBs in the UK. Their primary purpose is:

To conserve and enhance the natural beauty of the landscape.

Two secondary aims complement the primary purpose:

To have regard for the interest of those who live and work there.
To meet the need for quiet enjoyment of the countryside.

Both secondary aims should be undertaken without conflicting with the primary purpose.

AONBs are designated by Natural England (England), the Countryside Council for Wales (Wales) and Northern Ireland Environment Agency (Northern Ireland).

AONBs are cared for by dedicated professional teams working with local partner organisations.

http://www.aonb.org.uk