Putting Nature on the Map
A project to identify and categorise the places in the UK where the conservation of nature and landscape comes first
IUCN’s new guidelines on their protected area management categories were published in 2008. In the light of this advice, Nik Lopoukhine, Chair of IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas, has asked the IUCN UK National Committee (IUCN UK) to revise and expand the application of IUCN protected area categories in the UK and to improve coverage of UK protected areas on the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA).
In response to this request, IUCN UK has set up a Protected Areas Assignment Working Group to lead this process.
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IUCN-UK convened an expert workshop in London in February 2010 to introduce our proposal to work with the full range of public, private and voluntary organisations in all parts of the UK to identify what ‘protected areas’ exist, classify the aims of their management, record this information and make it available nationally and internationally (see documents and update).
Representatives from major government agencies/departments and NGOs at the London workshop endorsed the project. Now IUCN-UK is pleased to announce that initial funding has been secured thanks to generous offers from a range of partners, and that we are now looking to appoint a project co-ordinator. Details of this position can be found here. Steering and Advisory Groups are being formed to guide the project and a project name has been agreed: Putting Nature on the Map – a project to identify and categorise the places in the UK where the conservation of nature and landscape comes first. 
The project will be carried out over a year and is planned to begin in September 2010. At the end of the exercise in 2011, the Cambridge-based UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), which runs the World Database on Protected Areas, will have a comprehensive digital and mapped record of the land and sea areas in the UK where nature and landscape are given priority. This information will be freely available to all decision makers in the UK, and updated as required.