THE National Trust has launched an ambitious plan to nurse the UK’s natural environment back to health and reverse the ‘alarming’ decline in wildlife.

In the Lake District, the National Trust said it would challenge itself to develop new, innovative ways of managing land on a large scale, which would be good for farmers, the economy and the environment.

It also pledged to work with partners to help look after some of the country’s most important landscapes, reconnecting habitats and bringing back their natural beauty.

This year’s work in the Lakes will include the trust helping communities and land managers explore both the healthy landscape of the future and new economic models to sustain it against a backdrop of declining subsidies.

Europe’s biggest conservation charity said climate change now poses the single biggest threat to places the trust looks after, bringing new, damaging threats to a natural environment already under-pressure, and a growing conservation challenge to its houses and gardens.

Mike Innerdale, Assistant Director at the National Trust Lake District Hub, said: “Everything that people value in the Lake District - a spectacular landscape, flourishing communities and a strong, diversified economy - depends on, and is underpinned by, a healthy environment.

“So our first priority is to strengthen and build up the essentials of a living landscape: good soil, clean air and secure supplies of high quality water.”

Helen Ghosh, the Trust’s Director General, said: “The protection of our natural environment and historic places over the past 100 years has been core to the work of the Trust but it has never been just about looking after our own places.

“The natural environment is in poor health, compromised by decades of unsustainable management and under pressure from climate change. Wildlife has declined, over-worked soils are washing out to sea; villages and towns are flooded.

“Millions of people love and cherish the great outdoors, it’s vital to our sense of well-being, our identity and our health. But beyond that nature also supports us in all kinds of other ways, from flood protection to carbon storage. We can’t keep taking it for granted.”