Indexing wildness

Director of Policy David Fleetwood provides an update on the ongoing development of the Trust’s Wild Places Index.

As a species, humans do not have a good track record of protecting the natural world. Yet deep down, most of us instinctually value the preservation of wild natural places – areas where nature can thrive undisturbed.

The Trust’s developing Wild Places Index is devised to measure the attrition of wild places over time and to address the vulnerability that they face through lack of definition. It is a tool to help better understand what constitutes a ‘wild’ place, to guide the recovery of these areas and inspire a network of protected regions, from urban centres to remote mountains.

Overall, the goal is to ensure that future generations will inherit lands where they can witness natural processes with minimal human intervention (albeit within social and geographical constraints).

The index is designed to be the tool to guide humans to leave a lasting legacy of protected and thriving wild places across the UK. As these areas recover, they will become symbols of ecological resilience, offering future generations the chance to experience areas on the planet where nature leads the way.

Strategic planning

The development and rollout of a Wild Places Index will support the Trust’s strategic aims in two main ways. Firstly, it will provide an objective mechanism through which the quality of wild places can be assessed and understood. This will allow for the relative quality of wild places across the UK to be articulated and for the Trust to demonstrate the erosion seen in wild places over recent decades, which in turn supports our advocacy for their protection.

Secondly, the index will provide an understanding of the threats and pressures which a landholding is under, for example, from invasive non-native species or inappropriate development plans. This will allow for forward management plans to be developed which have a positive impact on the landholding’s ranking on the index, promoting land management practices that support wild places and nature.

Future development will allow for the index to be rolled out more broadly, including internationally and used to influence national and international frameworks for protection of wild places, including at a UN level.

Work so far has focused on establishing objective measures through which a landholding could be assessed for ecological integrity and presence of human features, plus establishing a methodology for assessing threats and pressures on the site, then managing this through a weighted decision-making process.

In addition, the Trust has worked to identify sites against which the indexing proof of concept can be tested with an initial focus on our own properties, as well as development of a network of potential partner landowners who may be interested in site testing.

Next steps

The next steps will see us finalise the data sources’ objective assessment of wild places as well as the process for quantifying threats and pressures. We will then test the prototype index on the land in our care.

Of course, wild places are not just defined by their physical characteristics, they also affect humans on an emotional level. This is why the Trust will in time be developing a second tool that focuses on perceptions within society and their intergenerational change. It will measure the perceptual and experiential elements of a wild place.

Together, the Wild Places Index and this second tool will enable the Trust to populate a Wild Places Register and monitor the state of wild places across the UK over the coming years.

• This article first appeared in the Spring/Summer 2025 edition of the John Muir Trust Members' Journal. If you would like to receive our Journal twice a year please consider joining the Trust as a Member.

Photograph at the top shows Quinag in Assynt, © Chris Puddephatt.