How geospatial integration was integral to establishing Essex City Council’s LNRS
The challenge
In 2021 the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) undertook a foundational consultation on LNRS implementation across the UK, establishing how all 48 local authorities should develop Local Nature Recovery Strategies (LNRS’) in their areas.
Essex County Council (ECC) is one of the largest and most geographically diverse LNRS regions in the country, spanning 11 districts.
Working in partnership with the Essex Local Nature Partnership, ECC faced a challenge common to many of the 48 authorities, but at significant scale: meaningfully consulting with all relevant stakeholders and communities on a spatial, technical and legally binding strategy.
Under the Environment Act 2021, all LNRS’ must include a local habitat map and a biodiversity priorities statement. For a region like Essex, that meant layering multiple datasets (conservation areas, reserves, areas of biodiversity importance etc.) into one interactive map.
On top of this, as a statutory consultation, the process itself needed to be rigorously documented and reported to DEFRA, adding a further layer of process and accountability to get right.
The approach
Essex County Council chose Citizen Space to deliver one of England's most complex consultations to date, combining large-scale public engagement with sophisticated interactive mapping using Citizen Space Geospatial to shape the future of nature recovery across Greater Essex.
They built a single consultation hub bringing strategy documentation and interactive geospatially powered maps together so respondents could have visual context when answering a combination of multiple-choice and open-ended questions. With skip logic, this allowed both quick input from the general public and detailed insight from engaged stakeholders such as farmers, landowners and environmental groups.
This meant residents could see exactly where proposed opportunities and priority sites sat relative to their own community, and respond with local knowledge that pure survey data alone would never capture, while ECC retained a single, statutory-compliant record of engagement that could be reported through to DEFRA as part of the formal process.
The result
The Essex LNRS public consultation ran from 30 August to 25 October 2024, gathering input from residents, businesses, farmers and community groups across the whole of Greater Essex. It stands as one of the largest and most spatially complex LNRS consultations run on Citizen Space to date, building directly on the foundations laid by DEFRA’s original 2021 consultation.
The strategy has since been published, with the improvement, enhancement and creation of habitats across Essex expected to deliver benefits including carbon capture, flood risk reduction through improved water absorption, protection of soil quality and agricultural production, and expanded space for nature and wildlife.
Essex's approach demonstrates what's possible when statutory obligation and genuine public engagement are treated as the same exercise rather than two separate ones — using geospatial tools not just to meet a legal requirement, but to make a complex, county-wide strategy tangible for the people it will actually affect.
Delib is a govtech leader specialising in consultation and engagement, trusted by over 600 government organisations worldwide, including major planning projects. Since 2004, we've been building secure, accessible digital platforms to make participation simpler, fairer, and more inclusive. Our flagship product, Citizen Space, was built in collaboration with the UK government and has supported more than 11 million responses across over 110,000 democratic activities.