Julie's Bicycle - working for a low carbon creative economy

Working with the Isle Of Wight music festival since 2008, Eco Action Partnership have initiated two separate bee campaigns on the island, Give Bees a Chance (GBAC) and Let it Bee, and have also ensured that the festival has become a major supporter of local conservation projects.

We’ve provided financial support through corporate sponsorship and specific bee-related fundraising activities, and brought increased awareness, through these campaigns, of climate change, conservation and sustainability issues, and have been able to highlight the main issues affecting honey and bumblebee populations at a local, national and global level.

The GBAC project comprised three parts;

1. An interpretation strategy of the vegetated soft cliffs and chines of the IOW, focusing on their extraordinary wildlife, especially bare-ground insects such as bees.
2. An investigation of the management and monitoring of cliff top buffer zones focusing in particular on their value to invertebrates, including nectaring for bees.
3. A longer term project researching and modeling impacts of climate change on the sustainability of the IOW chines, and therefore also their future role in providing these essential coastal bare-ground habitats. The vegetated soft cliffs of the Isle of Wight are internationally important for biodiversity.  Most are notified as SSSI and a significant proportion of the resource is included in the European South Wight Maritime Special Area of Conservation. The Environment Agency has been developing management plans to preserve the processes that create and sustain chine habitats. There is a delicate balance between the rate of sea-cliff erosion (which reduces chine extent) and storm-runoff driven headwards erosion processes, which acts to increase the extent of the chines. The research used data from Regional Climate Models and sea-level rise projections to produce models of Chine evolution and the results can be used to design long-term management recommendations to secure these important habitats for all wildlife in the future.

Monies raised were match funded by the Environment Agency and Wildlife Trusts enabling successful completion of GBAC, and in 2010, we started the Let it Bee campaign.

Let it Bee

We raised money to create a management plan for an area in Newchurch called the Field of Hope (FoH) in order to protect and monitor it long term. This sandy field has also become an extraordinarily good habitat for invertebrates, and especially for mining bees. There are several rare species already known from the site and additional survey work will be carried out. The funds raised for bee conservation at the 2010 Festival are being used to create new bee nesting sites within the Field of Hope, and to create and maintain a linked series of sunny and flower-rich glades
where nectar and pollen are plentiful the year round.

Completed summer, autumn and winter surveys show startling results. Six bee species entirely new to the island, some clearly indicating a spreading range as climatic response, but some revealing rare species, previously unknown, that are breeding successfully on the FoH. This in turn means that we can do something to improve and increase their numbers simply by providing more feeding and nesting niches of the same quality. The winter work carried out has seen new glades created with interlinking sunny corridors to encourage bees to move across the site following trails of wildflowers, and we will be building a series of bespoke nest banks to greatly increase populations of key species.

Aside from the tangible difference the above have made, our contribution to the climate change debate is to use our unique position to raise questions and awareness with major artists (we received a statement of support from Sir Paul McCartney and an interview on ITV2 supporting all things green and bee related), and to gain a high degree of publicity and support from national media, 55,000 festival goers and people on the island.

We also sponsor bee hives in Limerstone, have initiated an ecological management plan on the festival site, and supported other conservation projects, including red squirrel habitat protection and replanting indigenous black poplars on the IOW.

These initiatives also helped us to win an Outstanding Festival award from A Greener Festival two years running, which again encourages other major events like ours to feel obligated and empowered to initiate environmental change.

Richard Storey, Director
Eco Action Partnership
richard.storey@ecoactionpartnership.com