Restoring wildlife habitats within Brighton and Hove- how to rehabilitate nationally important plant and animal species in our region.

Did you know that almost half of Britain’s natural biodiversity has disappeared over the last 200 years? Farming and urban spread, triggered by the industrial and agricultural revolutions, are being blamed as major factors for this loss. In fact, the UK is in the bottom 10% of nations in terms of biodiversity intactness. Given these alarming statistics, the inevitable question arises, what can be done about this? This talk provides local examples in Brighton of what has been done over the last twenty years to heighten public awareness of this problem and help to reverse this trend, by creating new habitats for wildlife.

Dr Dan ‘Butterfly’ Danahar is a biodiversity educationalist, who has led many local initiatives within Brighton & Hove. These include leading in 2010 a city-wide approach to biodiversity loss, persuading the public to count butterflies in Brighton which inspired the national Big Butterfly Count and creating Butterfly Havens via an ecological engineering approach to habitat restoration. These initiatives have given the public access to nature on their doorsteps and are now widely adopted by Brighton & Hove City Council. Dan is Executive Trustee of the charitable company Big Nature – www.bignature.co.uk, which aims to revitalise the relationship between people and their local wildlife by creating natural habitats within the UNESCO designated Brighton & Lewes Downs Biosphere region (The Living Coast). He also set up the friends of the Liz Williams Butterfly Haven, which educates the staff and students of Dorothy Stringer School on local nature conservation. Finally, Dan is Executive Director of the Corfu Butterfly Conservation, and will be stepping down in April 2026, when he will write the first comprehensive atlas on the butterflies of Corfu.