Become a Nature Town or City

Accreditation

The Nature Towns and Cities Accreditation scheme, being piloted in England from April 2025, will recognise and reward towns and cities where the local authority is working with communities and other partners to create greener, healthier, resilient and thriving places.

Accreditation demonstrates your commitment to transforming green infrastructure to benefit people, place and nature. By achieving the award, you’ll have shown that you have good leadership, are involving and engaging communities and building effective partnerships. Together, you will have developed ambitious plans to improve the natural infrastructure of your town or city. You will also have considered how to secure funding and developed new ways to deliver with communities and partners.  

Why should you apply?

Progress through a framework to deliver outcomes for people, place and nature: Designed to incentivise at-scale, place-based transformation, the framework will help you plan how green and blue infrastructure can deliver across a range of priorities. These are wide-ranging, from public health to climate resilience, community empowerment and nature recovery. And they cover pressing issues like economic growth, active travel, and youth skills and employment.

Strengthen your partnerships: Taking a partnership approach makes it easier to deliver change, creating a sense of shared endeavour and building capacity across a place. For local authorities and the public sector, this provides an opportunity to strengthen your connections with communities and other partners and help everybody have their say in future plans. For the voluntary and private sectors, this is an opportunity to be part of setting the strategic direction for your town or city.

Get external recognition: Your town or city will be recognised for its plans to deliver urban landscape-scale change, which will help you make the case for investment and gain support from partners and the public.

Secure funding and investment: The accreditation will provide assurance to potential funders and investors that your town or city is equipped to deliver ambitious change. This will help to attract funding and finance from public, private and philanthropic sources.

Who can apply?

Applications can be made by place-based partnerships which include the relevant local authority. You will need to choose a lead to submit the application and supporting evidence. The lead applicant does not need to be someone from the local authority.

The accreditation scheme was co-designed and tested with a group of local authorities, with input from the voluntary sector, independent experts and other government agencies.