Paws & Stay x Campaign for National Parks

We're very lucky to have access to national parks and that such beautiful stretches of nature are protected. This is why we're excited to announce that Campaign for National Parks (CNP) will be our new, long-term charity partner!

CNP work endlessly to protect these parts of our heritage and refuges for biodiversity. They also ensure access to national parks remains open to a whole new generation so that they can grow up to love them too.

We're aiming to raise £50,000 to help protect our national parks and continue to improve access for the coming generations. But we need your help.

We're inviting you to donate and help defend these incredible spaces – with all proceeds going to Campaign for National Parks. If you're feeling like a hero, then you can donate below. Every donation will help towards our goal, even if it's as little as £2.

Protect our national parks: donate here

The beauty, spectacle and joy of national parks is immediately obvious to everyone, but it can take a few years to truly understand their importance. Until younger generations are old enough to realise how vital they are, it’s up to us to protect them for the future.

The existing protections put in place haven’t halted biodiversity loss and species extinctions caused by land use change and pollution. According to a recent British Ecological Society report, only 5% of national parkland is effectively protected and 75% of the SSSIs in English national parks are in an “unfavourable condition”.

The importance of these spaces only becomes more vital as we move into an era of unprecedented eco-system loss, and we need as many people, from as wide a background as possible to create a future where nature is the priority in national parks.

Only 6% of visitors to national parks are aged 16-24 and a shockingly small percentage are from non-white backgrounds. This needs to change.

Understanding something is the first step in loving it, and increasing access to all, regardless of background, is how we reach that understanding. From there, we can gain the popular support needed to create pressure, pass laws, and keep access and use of national parks responsible, and the natural bounty within protected.

Campaign for National Parks is a charity that works to protect England & Wales’s wild spaces and demand better policy and infrastructure from authorities. Their key aims are to ensure the parks will be preserved and accessed by as many people as possible – especially those with barriers to getting into nature, all the while as responsibly as possible.

Founded in 1936, the organisation is as old as the parks themselves, with their very first campaign resulting in the designation of the first national park in the UK, The Lake District. But their work didn’t stop there, since then they’ve fought to establish new parks, with the latest being The South Downs. There’s also a constant struggle to continue preserving existing parks.

We’ll be getting involved in funding bursaries for young people to share their stories, providing summit venues as well as volunteering projects. We aim to help give voices to young people, so they can have a say in shaping the landscape in the years to come.

We’re also continuing to lead the way in sustainable tourism, from researching and piloting schemes, to creating responsible travel guides.