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The Hampshire Landscape - a Strategy for the Future (summary)

Issues affecting the landscape

Issues affecting the landscape character are set out and reviewed in the full document, in the context of an understanding of Hampshire’s diverse landscape and how scarce or sensitive to change some of it is. Many of the issues affecting landscape character apply widely throughout Hampshire, but those that apply to particular areas are identified separately.

The review includes present-day issues and those arising from future influences and trends. It covers both land management and land use and the issues range from both positive and negative changes at all levels, global to local, including:

• wider environmental influences such as climate change, where the overall rise in global temperature is likely to have an increasingly significant direct impact on Hampshire with consequences such as more extreme weather like the great storms of 1987 and 1990;
  
  
• the erosion of character, quality and diversity in the landscape, and the decline in biological diversity across the county as a whole including the threat to scarce or irreplaceable environmental resources;
  
  
• European and national policies, such as for agriculture and woodland management;
  
  
• the intensification of agriculture brought about by technological and economic changes and the subsequent erosion of character, structure and diversity of the landscape;
  
  
  
• removal of hedgerows and their break-up and decline through lack of management;
  
  
• the loss and decline of habitats and species in recent decades;
  
  
• removal of woodland and the lack or decline of traditional woodland management practices, including the introduction of conifers into broadleaf woodland, particularly ancient woodland;
  
  
• a decline in the structure and condition of surviving historic landscapes;
  
  
• the condition and appearance of landscape on the fringe of urban areas;
  
  
• the effect of various forms of development including permanent loss of scarce or irreplaceable rural landscapes to urban expansion;
  
  

the failure of development to recognise and respect the diversity of landscape character; transport, with the effect of motor vehicles on rural roads and lanes, and major service stations on the strategic road network; the effect of minerals and waste both on the structure of the landscape and through the restoration and after-use of the site; the general tendency towards the urbanisation of rural or coastal landscapes including the effects of recreation, tourism and access, and an increase in noise in quiet and remote rural landscapes.

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This page is part of the Hampshire Landscape Strategy (summary) - for specific enquiries about the strategy or to request your own copy, please contact landscape@hants.gov.uk

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