What is Natural Beauty?

The distinctive character and natural beauty of AONBs make them some of the most special and cherished places in England. AONBs are living, working landscapes that contribute some £16bn every year to the national economy. Although home to less than half a million people (under 2% of England’s population), over two thirds of England’s population live within half an hour’s drive of an AONB and around 150 million people visit English AONBs every year, spending in excess of £2bn.

Together with National Parks, AONBs represent our most outstanding landscapes; unique and irreplaceable national assets, each with such distinctive character, natural beauty and cultural heritage that they are recognised internationally as part of the global Protected Areas Family. AONBs in particular, as ‘working’ landscapes, lead the way in pioneering new approaches to integrated countryside management based on voluntary partnerships engaging and working with local communities to secure common goals.

International Context

AONBs are ‘Protected Landscapes’ – along with UK National Parks – in the world scale of landscape and environmental protection.

Our AONB is part of a global family of 6,555 protected areas, covering 12% of the earth’s surface. These are overseen by the World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) adminstered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN has defined a series of six protected area managment categories and all AONBs in the UK as defined as Categeory V protected landscapes. A protected area where the interaction of people and nature over time has produced an area of distinct character with significant ecological, biological, cultural and scenic value: and where safeguarding the integrity of this interaction is vital to protecting and sustaining the area and its associated nature conservation and other values.

In contrast AONBs are living and working landscapes where human activities are part of everyday life; villages thrive, the land is farmed, foresters are active, and people enjoy all aspects of the countryside.

European Context

The European Landscape Convention – also known as the Florence Convention, – promotes the protection, management and planning of European landscapes and organises European co-operation on landscape issues.

The Convention has defined Landscape as “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors”.

This landscape convention builds upon earlier European Conventions, aimed at conserving wildlife and protecting architectural and archaeological heritage, and the Rio Convention on biological diversity. It starts from the fundamental acknowledgement: