Good Practice Planning for Invertebrates

We know that invertebrates can sometimes be complicated, they turn up at unexpected times and they are often overlooked when designing mitigation. To avoid this we are producing a suite of ‘best practice guidance.’

This will help you to understand when invertebrates should be considered and the best way to avoid or mitigate the impacts of a development on them. It will also help to avoid delays later on in the planning process.

If there is a rare bug on a development site it doesn’t mean that the development can’t go ahead, but there are steps that need to be taken to ensure a development sympathetic to wildlife is designed.

The good practice planning series starts with ‘Good planning practice for invertebrates – surveys’. This guide will help you to spot when a piece of land is valuable for invertebrates, the type of survey that is needed and the information required to assess a development’s impact on invertebrates. It is aimed at planners, developers and communities that are unsure whether or not a site is important for invertebrates.

This guidance series has been developed to compliment our Important Invertebrate Areas project – an ambitious new initiative to identify and map the UK’s most Important Invertebrate Areas, then inspire, inform and deliver real change on the ground for our most scarce and threatened invertebrates. Buglife is a member of the partnership for Biodiversity in Planning.

This guidance can also be used alongside our ‘Brownfield Hub’. Whilst some previously developed or ‘brownfield’ land can make a good development site, some areas are a haven for wildlife. Our brownfield hub will help to identify these sites and has case studies for inspiration.