When President Kennedy set out his ambition to send humanity to the moon and bring him back safely, he created a single inspiring action that unambiguously galvanised action.
From this statement, a whole host of people, from experts to citizens started to work together in ways never seen before to deliver a central objective, urgently. The activity itself, took hundreds of projects, risk-taking, trial and error and many failures along the way, before finally meeting its objective (Mazzacato 2021).
Sixty years since the launching of Project Apollo the challenges this Plan needs to address – climate change, nature recovery, water quality improvements, sustainable tourism and economic prosperity for our residents to name just a few – are complex and wicked problems which akin to the moon landing require the best of our energies and skill.
This is why Y Bannau: The Future takes a mission-led approach to the management of the Park. Setting out bold goals to act on our most pressing problems which will be achieved through collaboration across the public and private spheres. From ENGOs to citizens, salaried officers of our public bodies to farmers out in the field, we need to come together, to act to achieve bold transformation for the sake of future generations.
Mission Family
Our Mission approach comprises five key interconnected mission areas. We refer to them as our family of missions as they are all interconnected, reliant on one another and interrelated
These subject areas are based on our reading of the National Park Doughnut (see above) and concentrate on the key areas where the National Park breaches safe operating limits the furthest (see Issues section). These areas are those where we are in dangerous proximity to irreversible tipping points. These must be acted on as a matter of urgency. This understanding of the evidence requires concerted action in the following areas: –
- Climate
- Water
- Nature
And, in recognition of the significant breaches across almost the entirety of our social foundation and National Park Core, we have identified more generalised mission areas focused on:-
- People (visitors, residents, and business owners)
- Place (the geographical area where impacts can be felt)
The Missions
Each mission has its own chapter in this Plan. These chapters explain the mission, whilst also providing a wider contextualising rationale for the mission focus. In creating mission-based chapters, we acknowledge that we are establishing a false sense of delineation between the mission areas.
We know such separation is false, unfortunately it is the clearest way we can find to best communicate our vision. We want to acknowledge here that success for each mission area is actually dependent upon complex interacting systems between mission areas. To understand how our actions impact across the full range of our missions we return to our doughnut model to provide a holistic understanding.
These mission statements form our Well-being Objectives for the period 2023-2028 and demonstrate how the geographic area of the Park will contribute to the delivery of the 7 well-being goals through the five ways of working.
A bold collaborative approach
Although our Mission approach may seem hugely ambitious, we know that by pledging to commit our own resources, and working with our partners, the change that is needed can and will happen. Think of each of our missions as building up a tower of blocks. To build the tower, you need many blocks all coming together to create the final structure, the tower itself. Each block is placed in turn, and builds on the foundation of the blocks below. In our mission tower, each block represents a project, plan or activity, which in combination work together, to create the change that is needed. The job of Future Beacons is to define the parameters for this future activity, it is not to prescribe the exact form it should take. In accordance with our values of involvement and collaboration, the shape of each block and the contribution it makes, is for our partners to determine working with us. In the following pages you will find case studies of activities which form the foundation of these missions towers, which we call our ‘Ser y Bannau’ and details of the partnerships we will be working with to help deliver mission Future Bannau.
The National Park’s role in delivery
To demonstrate our commitment to the Mission approach we, as an organisation, set out what we believe our role is in helping deliver the missions. They are the biggest contributions we think we can make to achieve the missions. As well as our mission-orientated approach, we also believe that we as an organisation have a central role which we define as our overarching contribution to mission y Bannau. These define future activity which spans all our missions and will define a general pattern of activity for the organisation as a whole.
