Nature for People: Our Ecosystem Services Plan

Huntly has more green space per head than many towns in Aberdeenshire. The Meadows by the Deveron, Meadow Plantation, Battle Hill, Bin Forest at the edge of town — these are not incidental features. They are working parts of an ecological system that helps regulate flooding, cool urban temperatures, filter water, support pollinators, and provide the kind of contact with nature that consistently shows up in research as essential to wellbeing.

Greener Huntly has spent the past year mapping, assessing, and documenting that system. The result is an Ecosystem Services Plan for Huntly's greenspaces — the first of its kind for this area — setting out what we have, what it's doing, and what it needs to function well into the future.

The plan is built around the concept of a nature network: a connected web of habitats that allows species to move, ecosystems to recover, and communities to access nature wherever they live in the town. Rather than treating the Meadows or Knappach Wood as isolated sites, the plan looks at how they relate to each other and to the wider Deveron catchment — a riparian corridor of national significance that supports red squirrels, bats, otters, kingfishers, and species of breeding bird that have declined sharply elsewhere.

The findings are not abstract. The wet meadow on the Deveron floodplain is one of the rarest habitat types in north-east Scotland, and it sits in the middle of Huntly. It buffers the town against flooding, stores carbon in its undisturbed soils, and provides habitat for curlew, lapwing, and bumblebee species that depend on this kind of grassland and are running out of places to go. Restoring and protecting it isn't an environmental luxury: it's an investment in the town's resilience.

The plan also addresses the connection between greenspace and people. Two extensive community consultations — one led by the Huntly Development Trust and another through the Just Transition Project — both identified the Meadows as central to residents' vision for the town's future. People value it. The plan takes that seriously, embedding community engagement and stewardship into the management approach so that the greenspaces are shaped by the people who live alongside them.

Crucially, the plan is designed to work with existing policy frameworks. It aligns directly with Scotland's Biodiversity Strategy, the Scottish Government's Biodiversity Delivery Plan, and Aberdeenshire Council's own place planning work. That means it can be used to unlock funding, inform planning decisions, and make the case for greenspace in conversations where it might otherwise be overlooked.

We're at the beginning of what will be a long-term project. The plan is a foundation, not a finished article. But it puts Huntly in a stronger position than most towns of its size: with a clear picture of what we have, a framework for protecting and improving it, and a community that is already engaged in making it happen.