Nature Networks Should Be in Every Place Plan

Huntly has a Place Plan. Like place plans across Scotland, it sets out a vision for the town — how it should develop, what it needs more of, what kind of place it should be in twenty years' time. These are important documents. They shape planning decisions, direct investment, and signal what the council and community believe matters.

What Huntly's Place Plan does not yet fully integrate — and this is not unique to Huntly — is nature. The ecological system that surrounds and runs through this town is not a background condition. It is active infrastructure that is already doing specific work, and that will be asked to do more as the climate continues to change.

The Deveron floodplain protects the lower parts of Huntly from flooding that would otherwise affect hundreds of homes and businesses. The wet meadow on that floodplain stores carbon, filters water, and provides habitat for species disappearing elsewhere in Scotland. The woodland corridors connecting Bin Forest to the riverbank create the conditions for ecological resilience across a much wider landscape than their individual footprints suggest. These functions are real, measurable, and largely invisible in planning conversations because no one has put a number on them and few people have made the case clearly enough.

National Planning Framework 4, Scotland's new planning framework, is stronger on nature than its predecessors. It requires ecological networks to be identified and protected, it sets expectations around greenspace provision, and it aligns with the Scottish Biodiversity Strategy's commitments to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. But national frameworks only produce local change if local actors — councils, communities, and organisations like Greener Huntly — translate them into site-specific decisions and plans.

A grassroots place plan, developed by and for the Huntly community, can do something the official Place Plan struggles to do: it can integrate the fine-grained, locally specific knowledge of what is actually happening in these habitats, what the community values about them, and what needs to happen to protect and enhance them. It can sit alongside the official plan as a complementary document — not in opposition to it, but filling the gaps that national-scale planning is structurally poorly equipped to fill.

This is part of what Greener Huntly's Ecosystem Services Plan represents. It is not just an ecological document. It is a planning tool, designed to make nature legible within the frameworks and conversations where it has often been invisible. It maps what we have, identifies what it does, and sets out what it needs — in language that can be used in planning applications, in funding bids, and in conversations with councillors and officials.

Climate change is not arriving. In terms of increased flooding, altered seasons, and changed species distributions, it is already here. A Place Plan that doesn't account for the ecological infrastructure of a town is a plan that will need substantial revision rather sooner than expected. Better to do that work now, while the habitats are still intact and the options are still open.