Protecting the Countryside for Everyone to Enjoy – 2025 Review

At CPRE Peak District and South Yorkshire, our mission is rooted in a simple but powerful belief: the countryside is for everyone, wherever they live.

And throughout 2025, we’ve been proud to show how this vision can be realised. From rural residents to city visitors, and from campaigners to families enjoying green spaces, we’ve worked tirelessly to ensure the countryside remains thriving, accessible and sustainable for all.

A landscape under intensifying pressure

Many of the threats to the Peak District and South Yorkshire countryside, such as road building, transport infrastructure and housing developments, would be all too familiar to Ethel Haythornwaite, our founder.

Yet, the countryside faces an increasing number of challenges and competing pressures that threaten its sustainability, including:

• Climate change is altering weather patterns, increasing flood risks and threatening fragile habitats
• Nature crises are driving declines in biodiversity, with species once common now struggling to survive
• Clean energy infrastructure such as solar farms and wind turbines, while vital for decarbonisation, often compete with agricultural land and local landscapes
• Farming and food production continue to place demands on soil, water and ecosystems, while agricultural policy shifts create uncertainty for rural livelihoods

These pressures are not isolated; they overlap and compound one another, creating a complex set of challenges that must be addressed.

The countryside as a source of solutions

Despite these challenges, we believe the countryside holds many of the answers to the crises we face. Managed carefully, rural landscapes can:

• Store carbon through peatland restoration, woodland expansion and regenerative farming practices
• Support biodiversity by protecting habitats and reversing species decline
• Provide clean energy through well‑planned, appropriately sited renewables that do not undermine food security or landscape character
• Offer wellbeing benefits by giving people access to green spaces that improve mental and physical health
• Strengthen communities through sustainable farming, local food networks and rural services

We believe that the countryside is a living, working environment that, when cared for, can help society adapt to and mitigate the greatest challenges of our time. That’s why we campaign tirelessly to ensure the countryside is safeguarded and enjoyed by everyone.

Campaigning for protection

Throughout 2025, we have remained steadfast in challenging planning applications across multiple sectors. This means actively tracking proposals as they emerge, scrutinising their details and deciding when to step in with formal representations, constrictive comments or strong objections.

The projects below show how we have campaigned across different sectors to protect and preserve the countryside:

• Transport: We often oppose schemes that increase car dependency whilst supporting local campaigns that reduce carbon footprints, make the countryside more accessible and protect it from harm. Examples of projects we’ve supported include:
  • Glossop Action for Sustainable Travel, building on CPRE’s Low Carbon Travel multimodal alternative to the A57 Link Roads.
  • Hope Valley Climate Action, ensuring visitors and residents can travel sustainably and reduce their carbon footprint
  • Green Lanes Traffic Regulation Orders at places like Hollinsclough Rakes and Holmfirth
  • EMCCA Climate Coalition and Better Buses East Midlands, petitioning for public control of bus services
• Residential Housing: We scrutinise developments that threaten the Green Belt or fail to deliver genuinely affordable homes. Our advocacy promotes a brownfield‑first approach, ensuring housing meets local need without sacrificing countryside. Recent examples include:
  • Sheffield Green Belt, reviewing fourteen proposed sites, covering 3.6% of the Green Belt area
  • Hepworth Site in Loxley, opposing development that would harm the valley’s landscape character
• Energy: We question the scale and siting of mega solar farms that risk displacing agriculture and damaging landscapes, whilst campaigning for rooftop solar. Local examples include:
  • Marr Solar Farm: opposing a 190‑acre ground‑mounted photovoltaic scheme near Doncaster
  • Whitestones Solar Farm: scrutinising one of the UK’s largest proposed solar farms across multiple sites
• Tourism: We monitor applications at tourism sites such as holiday accommodation and wedding venues to ensure they respect local communities, heritage and the environment.

In doing so, our work is guided by clear principles: transport must be sustainable, housing must meet genuine need, wildlife and protected species must be safeguarded and communities must retain their amenity and heritage. We also assess how proposals affect landscape character, rights of way, biodiversity, climate resilience, ecology, and design. At every stage, we put the long‑term wellbeing of the countryside at the centre of our responses.

Navigating policy and representing members

Throughout the year, we’ve commented on plans at both a national and local level to safeguard landscapes while supporting those who live in, work in and enjoy visiting the countryside. This means navigating an extremely complex planning system and representing our members on some of the most important topics. From the Sheffield Local Plan to the National Park Plan and national frameworks, our role is to ensure that countryside voices are heard in decisions that will shape the future of our landscapes, for generations to come.

Beyond policy, we’ve worked closely with local campaign groups and members, offering guidance on the issues that matter most to them. Throughout 2025, priorities have included addressing the potential development of mega solar farms and safeguarding the Green Belt from inappropriate development. By amplifying community voices and submitting detailed responses to planning applications across the region, we’ve helped strengthen their influence and hope that these landscapes will receive the protection they deserve.

Thanks to the dedication of our members, volunteers and supporters, 2025 has been a year of progress. Together, we are continuing to support a thriving, beautiful countryside for everyone – today, tomorrow and for generations to come.

Continuing a countryside legacy

Our work continues the vision of our founder, Ethel Haythornthwaite, whose pioneering efforts helped secure the designation of the Peak District as Britain’s first National Park. She understood that landscapes must be defended not only for their beauty, but for their social and ecological value. Today, we carry forward her legacy by standing firm against short‑term pressures and advocating for long‑term stewardship of the countryside that benefits both people and planet.

Looking ahead

As we celebrate the achievements of 2025, we look forward with renewed commitment:

• To protect landscapes from unsustainable development
• To champion policies that balance the needs of people, nature and the economy
• To ensure access so that everyone, regardless of where they live, can enjoy the countryside
• To inspire action for wilder, more inclusive National Parks

Next year, CPRE will celebrate its centenary nationally – a year devoted to the charity’s heritage, reaffirming why countryside protection is more essential than ever and highlighting the work of CPRE branches as they restore and safeguard rural England for generations to come.