Restoring nature alongside communities across our landscapes and seascapes should be a top priority for National Lottery good cause funding.

The UK is experiencing increasing heatwaves, wildfires, drought and a decrease in healthy life expectancy. Nature can help both tackle the climate crisis, through storing carbon in healthy natural habitats, and help communities stay healthy and adapt to a changing climate. For example, through storing more water in the land and supporting a resilient food system.

As a priority, National Lottery funding should continue to support projects which bring back nature and save wonderful wild places for the public to enjoy, helping to achieve these targets and benefitting communities across the UK. The Green Finance Institute calculated that at least £44 billion additional funding is needed to meet the UK’s nature-related ambitions and achieve the Government’s own legally binding nature recovery targets set out in the Environment Act 2021.

Given the urgency of the climate and nature crises, it is important that there is an increase in funding to restore nature. Communities facing disadvantage are most impacted by nature loss and extreme weather.

Restoring nature will bring enormous benefits to people by enabling communities to cope with the impacts of climate change such as heat, flooding and drought, and supporting our mental and physical health. By increasing funding for nature, the National Lottery will support a huge range of benefits to communities across the UK. For example, rewiggling of rivers slows the flow of water. This improves habitats for the wildlife that call the river home and can reduce the impact of flooding downstream

The National Lottery currently supports many good causes, and projects of all kinds can contribute to restoring nature and tackling the climate emergency. These must be retained.

The Wildlife Trusts strongly oppose linking the amount of funding an area receives to how many lottery tickets are sold.

Across the UK, access to nature is not equal, with people living in underserved areas much less likely to be able to spend time in nature.

Linking the amount of funding an area receives to how many lottery tickets are sold there could make access to nature even more unequal, because areas with smaller populations could receive less funding and miss out on support for brilliant projects which would benefit their communities.

When deciding how to distribute the funding, it would be fairer to take into account the needs of the area, such as responding to climate change impacts and access to healthy nature spaces, and the benefits of the proposed project.

The consultation responses are likely to be read by AI (Artificial Intelligence).

Here are some tips to make sure your responses have as much detail as possible.

-AI engines don't read a document top to bottom like a person would. They break it into sections and retrieve the chunks that match a question. 

-Keep paragraphs short, 3-4 sentences, with one idea per paragraph.

-Make sure each paragraph can be understood on its own - avoid referring to information in other sections with words like "this", "it", "as described earlier".

-Put the most important point first. AI models use the first sentences heavily when getting the information.

-Be simple and direct.

-Use signposts like "in summary", "the key point is", "most importantly" or "crucially" to let the AI know what the main points are.

-Use bullet points. AI summaries often use the exact words from a bullet point list.