£4.1 million for nature recovery on an area the size of Birmingham.

Landowners, farmers and conservationists from the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales are joining forces in an ambitious partnership to create one of the UK’s largest nature-focused landscape programmes. The bold and ambitious programme, called Cumbria Connect, has successfully secured £4.1 million funding from the Endangered Landscapes Programme to help breathe new life into some 33,000 hectares. An area larger than Birmingham will be enhanced and enriched through nature-friendly farming, the creation of new habitats and the restoration of existing ones while working in close collaboration with the local community.

Cumbria Connect will create a tapestry of interconnected ecosystems which will support locally iconic species such as the red squirrel, ring ouzels and pied flycatchers. The project will also see the reintroduction of species once found in the area such as water voles.

Another cornerstone of the programme will be to help farmers in the area (as part of the Orton Fells Farm Cluster) to adopt new or existing nature-friendly business models to access grants from the UK government's new Environmental Land Management Schemes (ELMS).

By integrating nature-friendly farming practices into Cumbria’s farming heritage, the programme seeks to ensure not only the sustainability and profitability of farming businesses but also secure a prosperous future for both farming and nature in the area.

The Cumbria Connect project partners include the RSPB, Lowther Estate, the Orton Fells Farm Cluster, United Utilities and Natural England.

The Endangered Landscapes Programme is managed by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI), a unique collaboration between nine leading biodiversity conservation organisations based in and around the city of Cambridge, and the University of Cambridge. £4.1 million funding for the ELP and the Cumbria Connect Project came from the Arcadia Fund - a family charitable fund and one of the UK's largest philanthropic foundations. Its founders, Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, are from the family that own packaging company TetraPak.