Aubrey Farm land, previously owned by Kingwell (Aubrey) Ltd for Keyhaven Natural Capital Scheme, bought by Environment Agency

NEARLY 400 acres of farmland around Keyhaven has been bought by the Environment Agency only months after it was revealed it’s being turned into a nature reserve.

It’s part of the 605-acre Aubrey Farm at Keyhaven, owned by Kingwell (Aubrey) Ltd, which is being transformed into a nature reserve as part of the New Forest’s first nitrate mitigation project, the Keyhaven Natural Capital Scheme.

Nitrate mitigation credits and biodiversity net gain units can be bought by developers to enable building projects to take place elsewhere in the district.

The land, which includes fields adjacent to Sturt Pond nature reserve and near Avon Water, was purchased by the agency in an effort to meet its legal obligations to provide compensatory habitat in the Solent.

The farm connects a Site of Special Scientific Interest, a Ramsar wetland and Special Conservation Areas to create a 1,000-acre reserve west of the Pennington Marshes, and is set to be delivered in partnership with the national park authority and the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust.

A spokesperson for the EA confirmed: “A key location for enabling the creation of new coastal habitats and grazing marshes, the land forms part of the wider Kingwell (Aubrey Limited) Natural Capital Scheme that is delivering the first biodiversity net gain and nitrate mitigation schemes in the New Forest. The site will remain in some form of agricultural use for at least five years.”

Keyhaven sits between 80 acres of reed marshes at the mouth of the Avon Water and 500 acres of Keyhaven saltmarsh at Hurst Point.

Following the Environment Agency’s purchase of several fields surrounding Keyhaven, the spokesperson confirmed Kingwell will continue to operate its nitrate management scheme on the land the EA now owns.

Alongside this Kingwell will also continue to operate its stacked nitrate management and biodiversity net gain schemes on the extensive portion of land it still owns.

The acquisition was undertaken as part of the Habitat Compensation and Restoration Programme (HCRP), which is the government’s agreed scheme for delivering strategic habitat compensation in areas which are at risk flood and coastal erosion, the EA spokesperson explained.

Under these rules, protected habitats such as saline lagoons and other important European sites, which could be lost due to sea level rise and the rolling back of sea defences, must be replaced elsewhere.

The spokesperson added: ”The compensatory requirement passed on to the HCRP from Shoreline Management Plans is the amount of habitat required to address the adverse impacts on European sites from the SMP policies due to coastal squeeze and saline inundation impacts.

“We have identified that the habitat compensation needed for the strategy cannot be co-located with the Biodiversity Net Gain units that the Keyhaven Natural Capital Scheme would have created on the land behind Saltgrass Lane.”

Previous EA compensatory habitat schemes include the Medmerry managed realignment in West Sussex, which is hailed as an example of a project that has enabled the EA to protect 350 properties from flooding whilst creating 250 hectares of wildlife habitat.

• What do you think? Have your say on our letters page – email news@advertiserandtimes.co.uk