New Year's Resolution: How are you doing supporting our pollinators?

In January, we asked you to include how you will be supporting pollinators in your New Year’s Resolution. We provided an resolution board and included several resolutions to help you think about what you could do to help. We also provided information on how you could achieve these goals. A resolution could be liked or new ones could be added.

The number of likes has been tallied, plus the new resolutions submitted by you, and an amazing 153 resolutions have been set to help pollinators this year! That is an incredible number of actions that will hopefully take place this year. With 10 likes each, the top resolutions were:

• Plant more pollinator-friendly flowers in the garden
• Go peat-free for the year

What are we going to be doing?

We have also reviewed the ideas and comments on how we can also get involved, and have created the following aims for 2023. We will:

1. continue to review our land management practices and put in place, where we can, revised grass-cutting and maintenance regimes and apply pollinator-friendly planting. This applies not only to our highways network, but also our country parks, schools, and waste sites, plus our broader built estate.
2. be continuing to review and hope to reduce the use of glyphosate across land owned or managed by the County Council, except where no viable alternative exists. We will also continue to study new methodologies for weed removal as they become available.
3. work with Kent’s planning authorities to deliver improvements for pollinator habitats at the local level through, for example, their management of greenspace, local plans, and development management.
4. be developing a countywide Kent Pollinator Pledge, where, through a programme of work, parish and town councils, communities, landowners, businesses, and schools will be supported to take action for pollinators. For 2023 we will be focusing on developing a pledge tool for parish and town councils and community groups.
5. be re-running our No Mow May campaign, to raise awareness and showcase what KCC land will be taking part. The highest area of land pledged last year, was in Swale, and the largest individual numbers of pledges were recorded in Swale and Canterbury. Which districts will come out on top this year?
6. be getting more involved in some well-established pollinator citizen science projects, contributing our data and knowledge to help make a difference at a national level.
   1. The first project is the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme Flower-Insect Timed (PoMS FIT) Count. We hope to do this by establishing annual pollinator surveying at selected sites across County Council owned and managed land. The information collected on these surveys will not only go towards the project, but also help to monitor the effect of land management practices on pollinator numbers and provide an indicator of the impact of Plan Bee.
   2. The second project is the annual Bugs Matters survey by recording the number of insects on car number plates in the summer months. We will be contributing to this project through our own service fleet vehicles and encouraging our staff with their journeys to and from the office.

Now, it’s time to hear how you are getting on!

Below we have created a storyboard for you to share your stories of how you completed your resolution. Don't forget to include which resolution you chose, a photo and a description of what you did.

We hope that this will inspire others to complete their resolution or pick up a whole new action.

If you haven't made a New Years Resolution yet why not make one today. Use our ideas board below to tell us your resolution.

We will be sharing on here our ideas and tips on how to complete some of the resolutions.

Some stories may even be featured on the Kent's Plan Bee newsletter and Facebook page to inspire others to take the same action.