A timeframe within which the Cairngorms National Park will be net zero will be set by 2023, alongside a target for becoming carbon negative, contributing to the delivery of net zero for Scotland by 2045. This will be supported by:

a) Focusing on nature-based solutions.
b) Being a rural exemplar in achieving a just transition.
c) Working with businesses, land managers, communities and visitors across the National Park.
d) Developing a wellbeing economy (see People policy B1).

The management and use of land should deliver multiple benefits and help deliver the Regional Land Use Framework. This will be supported by:

1. A long-term, planned approach by land-based businesses to delivering environmental, economic and social benefits.
2. Support for land managers to plan and deliver environmental and social benefits, underpinned by sound economic businesses.
3. Working with farmers, crofters, communities and land managers to optimise local food production where factors such as supplier capacity, supply chains and consumer markets are favourable.
4. Applying a regionally-targeted approach to rural payments to deliver the most appropriate range of public benefits to the National Park.
5. Developing an approach to private green investment in the National Park to fund nature’s recovery and share the benefits between communities, landowners, workers and wider society.
6. Research to support management options.

Enhance the resilience of habitats, species and land use to climate change, pest and disease risks. Ensure that the integrity of designated sites is maintained, with a particular focus on:

1. Collaborating on land use and flood management, including natural flood management, through river catchment management plans.
2. Enhancing the health and connectivity of habitats.
3. Encouraging new woodland creation that complements other land uses and the landscapes of the National Park. This should support forest habitat connectivity, be compatible with moorland management and should not adversely impact on local agricultural priorities, including no wholesale conversion of enclosed, in-bye land.
4. Securing protection and restoration of degraded peatland, and sustainable management of peat and carbon-rich soils to maintain and improve their ability to store carbon.
5. Ceasing fires on deep peat and reducing burning on shallow peat soils through licensing.
6. Reducing red deer and other herbivore (roe deer, fallow deer, sheep and hare) numbers where needed across the National Park to enable woodlands to expand, heather loss to be reversed, peatlands to recover and wider biodiversity and landscape enhancement to take place.
7. Applying a ‘green engineering first’ approach to flood management and water storage within catchments in the National Park.

Conserve and enhance the special landscape qualities of the National Park, with a particular focus on:

1. Wildness qualities.
2. Maintaining and promoting dark skies.
3. Supporting woodland expansion that maximises opportunities for long-term enhancement of landscape and wildness qualities and limits short-term negative impacts through early engagement and good scheme design.
4. Delivering enhancements that also provide habitat improvements.
5. Enhancing opportunities to enjoy and experience the landscapes of the National Park.
6. Applying a presumption against new constructed tracks in open moorland and, where agreed, ensuring new tracks are constructed to a high standard.

Conserve and enhance habitat quality and connectivity, while ensuring the integrity of designated sites is maintained, with a particular focus on:

1. Supporting woodland creation and management, especially natural regeneration and riparian woodlands, delivering more natural and native woodland cover to create habitat connections between catchments and minimise the need for fencing.
2. Creating a more natural transition from woodland to montane scrub to upland heath, with more structural and species diversity. Linking habitats together sympathetically, with pockets and strips of trees and shrubs on moorland edges, steep slopes, in gullies and around woodland remnants.
3. Conserving and enhancing wetlands.
4. Protecting and improving the freshwater environment.
5. Delivering a combination of ecosystem services, including natural flood management, carbon sequestration and storage, timber and food production.
6. Managing public greenspace and transport networks for biodiversity enhancement and habitat connectivity.
7. Supporting off-site mitigation from development that contributes to ecological networks.

Conserve and enhance the species for which the Cairngorms National Park is most important, with a particular focus on:

1. Species whose conservation status is in decline or at risk.
2. Tackling and reducing the impacts of invasive non-native species.
3. Tackling and reducing wildlife crime.
4. Minimising disturbance to sensitive species in particular locations at certain times of year.
5. Engaging people on species that are important in the National Park.
6. Promoting biological recording of species in the National Park.
7. Undertaking appropriate work for species reintroductions or reinforcement as required.
8. Taking an adaptive management approach that reflects changing evidence and policy.