Residents from across Nottingham have created a plan to tackle the city’s biggest environment and climate-related problems
The Green Heart is just the beginning of the rewilding of Nottingham city centre(Image: LDRS)
Residents from across Nottingham have created a plan to bring Sherwood Forest back to the city in a bid to make it greener, healthier and cooler – ultimately helping to lessen the impacts of a “worrying future”.
The Met Office says climate extremes are now becoming “the new normal” for the UK.
Despite historic heatwaves like the one in 1976, overall temperatures as high as those now being experienced in the 21st century were comparatively uncommon in the 20th century.
In fact, 2025 was the UK’s warmest year on record, and it was the sixth time this record was broken in the 21st century so far.
Then, during the second of three heatwaves in 2026, Nottinghamshire recorded its highest ever night-time temperature of 21.3C at the end of June.
To help combat the struggles of living in an ever-warming city, people from all walks of life across the city formed a citizens’ assembly to draw up a plan.
This plan, or manifesto, reveals hopes to bring the ancient Sherwood Forest back to the city by expanding the Green Heart into every neighbourhood via “long, green arteries”.
The ancient forest once extended all the way from the northern boundary of Nottingham to the flat land around Doncaster, before heavy deforestation largely for ships and galleys.
A lack of trees and vegetation, replaced now by concrete, glass and asphalt, can lead to the urban heat island effect, whereby these materials make built-up areas much warmer than their natural counterparts.
Over two weekends in May, a group of almost 60 people representing all communities of Nottingham, including those sceptical of the science and data, met to talk about the environment and climate of the city in the future.
There had been more than 600 applicants in total, and the assembly has been utilised to create a more democratic and representative means of informing key decisions in the city.
After discussing the environment and climate with each other and a number of experts, the group voted on a manifesto that will now be presented to decision-makers in the city.
It is hoped the manifesto, which was revealed on Thursday (July 23), will be used to inform future policy.
Sally Longford, a former deputy leader of Nottingham City Council and its portfolio holder for environment, is now the vice-chair of the Nottingham Green Partnership, which helped organise the assembly process.
“They worked really hard, they had experts to advise them, they questioned the experts. Some of them were quite a tough call, and they came up with this manifesto,” she said.
“We’ve got people who were not interested in the environment beforehand, not particularly committed, and people who are very committed, all mixed up and talking in depth about different topics.
“It is quite a worrying future. I’ve got small grandchildren in the city and I want them to have a good quality of life, and that was how people saw the assembly. They wanted to make things better for the future.”
One of the sceptics was Paul Wardle, an author from Bulwell who was selected as a member of the assembly.
Paul Wardle, of Bulwell, who said he was sceptical at first, helped draft the manifesto for a greener, cleaner city of Nottingham(Image: LDRS)
He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS): “I would have been err-ing on the side of scepticism. I would have been somewhat doubting.
“One of the pleasing aspects of coming to the first meet was the diversity of the group, because in the past, a lot of green projects have been mostly populated by the green lobby, and everyone thinks the same.
“Lots of opinions were given, everything was done democratically, so there is nobody dictating what gets picked and what doesn’t.
“It has improved my own personal thoughts on environmental issues. I now look at it in a more positive way. It has been a great eye-opener.
“The Green Heart is like planting the seeds of change. I want to see the Green Heart grow out around Nottingham. It’s nice to see we are not just thinking about the people of the city, but the critters, the insects and animals.”
Some of the other ideas in the manifesto include using early education to teach children about growing food locally, prioritising infrastructure to reduce flooding, as well as lowering business rates for environmentally-friendly companies and introducing tariffs for those that are not.
Other ideas, such as Ultra-Low Emission Zones (ULEZ) and the promotion of plant-based diets, gained significant support from the assembly but didn’t meet the threshold to be included.
Citizens assemblies have been used before to great impact, including in Ireland between 2016 and 2018, when it was used to break the political deadlock and lead to the repealing of the Eighth Amendment, which banned abortion in almost every circumstance by recognising the constitutional right to life of the unborn.
Cllr Sam Lux, the council’s executive member for climate and energy, said the assembly had been about coming from a place of listening rather than top-down decision-making.
“I’m delighted also it is not super far away from the agenda [the council] was already thinking about and starting to pursue,” she said.
“What this does is give us a very strong mandate to reinforce that work and go even further because it has come from ordinary people, not necessarily those already engaged on the climate crisis and the nature crisis, so we know that it’s not skewed and reflective of what ordinary people want to see in Nottingham.”