RHONDDA CYNON TAF ACTION FOR NATURE PLAN
These actions are aimed at businesses who would like to take positive action for their local environment, perhaps as part of their environmental and community responsibilities.
1.
Manage Land
There are a number of ways you can help nature during the course of your land management. Go peat-free, avoid pesticides and herbicides, look after your trees and avoid hedge cutting and tree works in bird nesting season. You could also join in with the #FollowtheButterfly campaign and start managing grassy spaces as wildflower meadows. Learn more from Plantlife.
2.
Sustainability helps wildlife
Taking steps to become a more sustainable business e.g. through energy and water efficiency, reducing transport, waste etc.. All will help wildlife locally and globally.
4.
Support the LNP and its members
There are many ways you can support the LNP and/ or its members e.g. by sponsoring a project, promoting our activities, team building habitat management days or even corporate membership of local conservation charities. Contact us if you are interested in this.
5.
Engage your employees
Utilise their knowledge and enthusiasm to identify your impacts on wildlife and how to address them. Why not schedule a meeting where your staff can share their ideas?
6.
Become a 'Bee Friendly' business
Take action for pollinators and become a Bee Friendly business. By undertaking actions under the four themes (food, five star accommodation (habitats), freedom from pesticides and fun), you can apply for this accreditation. Find out more here.
Hirwaun Industrial Estate Peat Bog
Hidden from view behind the industrial units of the Hirwaun Industrial Estate and glimpsed only momentarily from the main A465 Heads of Valley Road lies a nine-metre-deep, 15 hectare peat bog. For years the bog was forgotten, the subject of landfilling, neglect and disregard. An impediment to progress. However, although battered and bruised it had survived. A sea of purple moor-grass studded with peat pools, a rare example of a lowland raised peat bog with has only recently been re-discovered and recognised as a precious environmental asset. The story of its re-discovery is one of chance and luck, a strange coming together of circumstances and opportunities. It is the story of how a requirement upon National Grid to accommodate the green energy production of the upland windfarms of the south Wales Valleys realised a renaissance in the fortunes of the bog. A bog that has been pragmatically and perhaps poetically christened as the Hirwaun Industrial Estate Peat Bog.
The bog sits in the valley bottom of the Cynon Valley in Rhondda Cynon Taf at the northern edge of the South Wales Valleys close to the boundary of the Brecon Beacons National Park. It lies immediately next to the gleaming new Rhigos NG substation. Through the planning application for a new electricity sub-station the importance of the bog was recognised and National Grid purchased the greater part of bog and under a Section 106 Management Agreement it is now managing and restoring the peat bog. With up to nine meters of peat, the bog perhaps started to build 9,000 years ago, possibly as a glacial melt-water lake within a drumlin field of rounded smooth tumps. The closely adjacent Blaen Cynon Special Area of Conservation (SAC) supports a sister bog, which together with the Industrial estate bog are the largest remaining bogs within this much changed glacial landscape.