Posted in Coastal Tales News, News on Sep 22, 2026.
We are pleased to highlight an article by Victoria Jenkins, published in the Journal of Environmental Law (Vol. 38, Issue 1, 2026, pp. 43–63), which references Coastal TALES: Recognizing the natural heritage of landscape in the law of England and Wales | Journal of Environmental Law | Oxford Academic.
The article addresses a critical lacuna in legal frameworks: the omission of 'natural heritage'. While environmental law regularly uses terms like 'biodiversity' or 'ecosystem services', it largely ignores 'natural heritage', failing to capture how communities relate to, value, and steward the living landscapes around them over time. The paper argues that protecting natural heritage—by recognising the deep spatial and temporal interconnections between people, nature, and place—is indispensable for addressing contemporary ecological and climate crises.
Reconnecting Nature, Heritage, and Landscape
Legal systems often artificially separate built/cultural heritage (historic buildings, monuments) from natural conservation (species protection, habitats). The article argues that landscapes are living co-creations of human culture and natural processes. Neglecting the natural heritage dimension overlooks traditional stewardship practices, local ecological knowledge, and deep sense-of-place.
Three Core Pillars of Proposed Legal Reform
To bridge this statutory gap, the paper sets out three targeted legislative reform pathways for England and Wales:
Heritage Law: Revise statutory heritage frameworks to formally protect tangible natural heritage features (e.g., ancient veteran trees, natural coastal formations, historic river channels) alongside built cultural monuments.
Planning Law: Adapt land-use planning regulations so that the intangible values of natural heritage—such as local folklore, historical land management memories, and social identity tied to landscape—are explicitly articulated and given weight in development decisions.
Rural Land Management: Embed natural heritage protections directly into the governance, rules, and standards that regulate agriculture, forestry, and inland waterways.
Particular Reference: Coastal TALES, UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES
A central premise of the research is supported by real-world transdisciplinary models, notably the Coastal TALES (Telling Adaptation: Living Environmental Stories) project, operating within the framework of UNESCO MOST BRIDGES.
The BRIDGES Context: As part of UNESCO’s Management of Social Transformation (MOST) programme, BRIDGES champions humanities-led, transdisciplinary sustainability science. It advocates that tackling complex ecological crises requires braiding traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge systems with contemporary climate science.
Coastal TALES as Empirical Proof: Coastal TALES demonstrates how community narratives, oral histories, and traditional practices serve as living natural heritage that directly enables climate adaptation. Examples include:
Dublin Bay (Ireland): Using oral folklore and historical maps to reintroduce natural, soft-defence systems (e.g., oyster beds, eelgrass, stone reefs) as sustainable alternatives to hard concrete walls.
Southwest Wales: Reviving traditional food and coastal harvesting practices (such as coracle fishing) to bolster food security, marine biodiversity, and community resilience against warming waters.
Kodiak Island (Alaska): Utilising Sugpiaq elders' storytelling to pass down ancestral knowledge of marine stewardship to younger generations.
The article references these projects to demonstrate that natural heritage is not merely a static aesthetic preference, but a dynamic pool of functional knowledge capable of offering place-based, innovative solutions to modern environmental challenges.
Evolving Law to Honour Human-Nature Connections
The article concludes that reform in environmental and heritage law is urgently required. By formally integrating natural heritage into statutory frameworks across planning, heritage, and agricultural policy, law can evolve from a reactive tool of conservation into an active mechanism that honours human-nature relationships. Projects like the Coastal TALES initiative provide the empirical template required: showing that respecting the historical and cultural values embedded in natural landscapes is essential to building ecologically resilient communities.
Publication details: Victoria Jenkins, ‘Recognizing the natural heritage of landscape in the law of England and Wales’, Journal of Environmental Law, Volume 38, Issue 1, March 2026, Pages 43–63.
