ERC are supporting the Solent Seascapes project with their Seascape Recovery Plan. The Solent Seascape Project, which is led by the Blue Marine Foundation (BMF), is a collaborative five-year initiative, working to restore multiple habitats across the Solent. ERC are working with Resources for Change (R4C) to support BMF with the delivery of the Solent Seascape Recovery Plan.

We have developed and are now implementing a Stakeholder Engagement Delivery Plan (SEDP) to ensure that the Seascape Recovery Plan (SRP) is co-produced with Solent Stakeholders.  The SEDP advises on co-production and engagement approaches, ensuring alignment will other workstreams, it sets out the how, what, where and when of the engagement required to create the SRP and deliver the actions identified. This will ensure that the final SRP has a shared vision, aims & objectives and an implementable action plan that stakeholders can own.

Phase one of SEDP has been completed. This involved a survey to find out the publics views about the Solent and its coastal and marine habitats. The results of the survey fed into five workshops which were run for stakeholders around the Solent during March 2025. These were attended by 101 participants from a wide range of organisations. The purpose of the workshops was to involve a group of stakeholders in learning about, deliberating, and identifying priority outcomes related to nature recovery in the Solent, it included a visioning exercise (i.e. Postcards from the future), SWOT analysis and and consideration of desired outcomes for the Solent. The main outputs from the phase one workshops were:

• Stakeholder ideas on the vision for the Seascape Recovery Plan
• A long list of outcomes for Nature Recovery in the Solent

These are being analysed to develop a revised vision and a working short list of outcomes which will be taken to a second round of workshops in June 2025 to consider how these outcomes can be realised through the Solent Seascape Nature Recovery Plan. If you are interested in attending one of the June workshops then please get in contact. 

A third round of workshops will be held in  Autumn 2025 and the outputs will form the basis of the Solent Seascape Nature Recovery Plan which will be produced by Blue Marine Foundation by the end of the project in 2027.