Pewley and Merrow Downs Nature Reserves and Fire risk assessments
Case reference FOI2022/00807
Published 7 September 2022
Request
Please provide the risk assessment for the re-wilding of Pewley and Merrow Downs, and if you assessed the risk of fire and the impact of fire due to rewilding
Response
Pewley and Merrow Downs are protected as Local Nature Reserve and Common Land to preserve the landscape, habitats and public access for future generations.
The management aim is to preserve (and improve) the natural habitat on both sites by continuing past management that allowed these areas to establish.
This is different from re-wilding which changes the management of an area in order to create more natural habitat as we do in some areas of previously short mown grassland.
The decision to continue to manage sites as nature reserves is driven by the aims to protect these sites for future generations and the recognition that the loss of natural habitat is a major contributing factor to climate change that triggers the events such as drought and flooding. We do not ordinarily carry out a risk assessments of weather occurrences when deciding to protect a natural habitat.
We do, however, manage that risks that occur on sites and are currently in the process to review our operational risk assessments for all the sites where the fire risk is changing with changes in weather patterns.
The current assessment of fire risk is as follows:
Regular contact with Surrey Fire and Rescue to ensure that we have procedures in place to react quickly to emergencies.
Most of these fires were started by people lighting fires and barbecues. To help prevent this we are:
• putting up signs reminding people not to light fires and barbecues on our land
• asking people to take their litter home
• cutting wider fire breaks. This has been proven to prevent fires spreading across our meadows and into built-up areas.
The removal of meadow areas does not prevent fires on sites. Our meadow management of curt and collect (and even better conservation grazing) does prevent build-up of combustible material over the years.
Our approach will help us meet our climate change commitment and is consistent with the other land managers in Surrey
Documents
This is Guildford Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
You can browse our other responses or make a new FOI request.