Volunteering opportunity: your chance to help us protect the dunes!

We need you! Help us to improve Norfolk walking & cycling paths and protect Norfolk’s sand dunes!

Norfolk County Council Environment team is working to:

• improve walking and cycling paths, giving people better access to the countryside with the associated multiple benefits to rural communities.
• Protect Norfolk’s sand dunes from the impacts of recreation

With limited funding Norfolk County Council Environment team relies on data to make evidence based decisions on where to direct funds to make improvements, create and extend paths. We are therefore carrying out surveys for several projects in a range of Norfolk locations and seeking volunteers to be interviewers at these sites.

Surveys are being carried out in October related to two projects – Green Pilgrimage, and ENDURE (Ensuring Dune Resilience Against Climate Change).

What are we looking to find out?

The ENDURE project is looking to apply new solutions to ensuring dune resilience and adaptation capacity to climate change (sea level rise). Norfolk County Council Environment team is looking to reduce the impact visitors have on Norfolk dunes when visiting the coast path and other trails. We want to encourage people to keep using the trails whilst enjoying our natural environment responsibly. We therefore need to understand how people use the trails, paths, beaches and dune areas so we can better work with visitors to help manage dune sites sustainably.

The ENDURE project will have more opportunities to volunteer through our network of stakeholder organisations working in the dunes. If you love the coast this is a great opportunity to volunteer to help protect our sand dunes in the future.

The Green Pilgrimage project recognises walking pilgrimage as a growing trend in the global travel industry and also when supported well, its contribution to sustainability as a form of low impact tourism. Surveys will seek to better understand the profile of visitors to Walsingham, who they are, their motivations for visiting, the impact on their health and well-being and how they would value improvements to walking/cycling routes in the area.

Interested in helping as a volunteer?

We’d love you to get involved. This is a great opportunity to find out more about our research, good practices surrounding interviewing and meet others interested in the promoting access to the countryside. We will provide basic expenses as well as tea/coffee on your survey days.