About us
Our vision:
To be a global exemplar of how our most precious landscapes can work in harmony with a thriving, economically successful community.
Our mission
The Green Halo brings together organisations from across the public, private and third sectors to:
- Inspire – by promoting best practice in protecting and enhancing natural capital and ecosystem services
- Encourage – by developing and delivering new projects
- Support – by identifying resources for projects and offering expert advice to help deliver them
- Inform – by continuing to promote and publish research on ‘natural capital’, and by communicating its activities to local communities.
Why a halo?
The benefits we get from nature are not constrained by boundaries, and neither should our ambition.
The idea was born in the New Forest National Park but the partnership wants to identify, value, protect and improve our natural world across a much wider area.
This is why it includes organisations from Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Dorset and Wiltshire. But the ‘halo’ can stretch as far as we want it to.
About the Partnership
We bring together businesses, universities, charities and communities to ensure our world class environment in and around the New Forest National Park flourishes as an integral part of our wider area’s thriving economy and society.
The New Forest is one of Europe’s best sanctuaries for nature, situated in the busy south east of England and surrounded by Southampton, Bournemouth, Poole and Salisbury.
Beyond the National Park’s boundaries, from Cranborne Chase to Purbeck, the South Downs to the Solent, much of this part of southern England is internationally valued because of the quality of the natural environment.
Our Partnership wants to ensure that the natural environment is seen as an integral part of how we work and live.
Our ambition is not constrained by administrative boundaries, opportunities can come from all areas and all sectors in and around the National Park – hence the Green Halo.
By recognising the contribution our natural environment makes to the local economy and society, our Partnership wants to ensure that both the National Park and its surroundings work to protect and improve that environment.
What is natural capital?
‘Natural capital‘ is the world’s stock of natural resources which are essential for people: these include geology, soils, air, water and all living organisms.
These assets provide us with a wide range of goods and services which underpin our economy and communities – ‘ecosystem services‘.
These are the gifts nature gives us.
Examples of ecosystem services are:
- economic resources we use such as water, timber or food
- the role plants and trees play in removing pollutants from the atmosphere
- the contribution habitats in the upper catchment of rivers can make to protecting urban areas downstream from flooding
- our income from local tourism
- the health benefits people gain from spending time in the outdoors.