Monaghan Town Biodiversity Plan
A few years ago, Monaghan Town Tidy Towns set out on a journey to make the urban space and hinterlands of Monaghan as biodiverse as possible. Biodiversity has long been an intrinsic part of Tidy Towns. In the competition, 50 of the maximum 470 points are for Nature and Biodiversity in Your Locality. Monaghan Tidy Towns decided to go a step further and declared that they would become a Biodiversity Town.
In 2010, Flynn Furney Environmental Consultants carried out their first work for this Tidy Towns group, the first habitat survey of Monaghan town and drew up a ‘top ten’ of habitats within the town and these they adopted as their Habitat Highlights. Since then, this highly innovative Tidy Towns group has gone on to win the National Pollinator Award as well as a string of medals and accolades. See some of their work here
FFEC are delighted to have been given the task of creating the group’s Tidy Towns Plan since 2016 but this is a development plan with a difference. This plan has biodiversity at the very heart of all that they are planning to do, not just as an add-on to get extra points but as a real and practical response to our biodiversity crisis.