Chris Baines becomes Trust President

Professor Chris Baines is one of the UK’s leading environmentalists, a qualified horticulturalist and landscape architect and an award-winning writer and broadcaster. He works as an independent adviser to industry and to central and local government.
Chris was a trustee of the Heritage Lottery Fund from 1998 until 2004 and is now a member of HLF’s expert panel. He is also a trustee of the Waterways Trust and the steering committee of CABE Space. He was one of the founders of the urban wildlife movement in the UK and is a national vice president of The Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts and the Countryside Management Association. He is also President of the Thames Estuary Partnership, the Association for Environment-conscious Builders, the Urban Wildlife Network and the Essex Wildlife Trust. In 2004 he was awarded the RSPB’s annual medal for his contribution to conservation.
Chris has long-standing professional links with major companies in the minerals, construction, energy, water and finance industries. He works occasionally as an adviser at ministerial level and also contributes to policy development with government agencies and a number of local authorities, particularly in the context of sustainable development.
Because Chris has experience across all three sectors, he is frequently called upon to help in facilitating “joined-up” initiatives and in brokering “unholy” alliances. He is also a frequent speaker at national and international conferences, and contributes regularly to the broadsheet press, to popular magazines and to BBC Radio 4.
Chris works from home in inner-city Wolverhampton.
He said: "I am very excited about becoming the Trust’s president. I have been thrilled by the Trust’s recent Chelsea Flower Show triumphs – continuing the revolution I began in 1985 – and I can see that Essex is ideally placed to bring people and wildlife closer together in many other different ways.
I live a very long way from the sea, so I am looking forward to exploring – and no doubt tasting - some of the best coastal heritage in England. The Trust’s work at Abbotts Hall Farm is a brilliant example of an ecological response to agricultural review, climate change and rising sea levels. In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, and with proposals to build huge numbers of new homes behind the levees of Thames Gateway, the Trust’s experience in managing coastal retreat is bound to prove increasingly influential.
Pressure for development will dominate much of the work of the Trust over the coming years. Inevitably there will be site–specific battles, but we need to make sure that issues such as water supply, transport infrastructure and waste management are treated boldly and imaginatively. If handled well, then built development can produce extensive new wetlands for surface water management, new broad leaf woodland to provide shelter, shade and cleaner air, and endless opportunities for daily contact between people and the nature on their doorstep.
Creative partnerships hold the key to modern nature conservation. As a jack-of-all-trades with a wide network of colleagues and contacts across the public, private and voluntary sectors, I will do all I can to help the Trust make Essex and its wildlife relevant to the wider issues of the day."