Following the UK’s warmest and driest spring on record, this summer Moors for the Future Partnership teamed up with digital marketing agency nativve to take a new approach to wildfire awareness communication on social media. nativve donated their expertise as part of their 1% for the Planet support and worked with popular content creators to run a campaign of social media posts. The campaign included science-based content, genius hacks and confessions-style videos. The team monitored the impact of the content, which gained over 9.5 million views, observing a 65% increase in social media followers engaging with this important message.
The campaign ran across the summer holidays, July-September 2025. Moors for the Future Partnership’s Communications Programme Manager Emma Shaw said, “For this collaborative campaign we really wanted to be pushed out of our comfort zone and to put our trust in nativve to try something we hadn’t tried before, and this was certainly rewarded. Our main aim was to reach out to new audiences to make sure they felt confident to visit our moors while keeping themselves and the landscape safe and with this, we did. It’s only been possible thanks to the incredibly kind donation from nativve and we have learned so much from them while putting this campaign together.”
With 20 million people living within one hour’s drive of the Peak District National Park, the park hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors over the summer months. The park covers five counties, Derbyshire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Yorkshire and Greater Manchester and includes vast areas of upland peatland.
With peat being made up of 50% carbon, long spells of hot dry weather and increased numbers of people visiting the landscape increases the risk of wildfire on the moorland landscape. In 2025 the Peak District and South Pennines uplands have suffered over 40 wildfires, impacting an area of over 1,400 hectares in total, the equivalent of 1,961 football pitches.
Moors for the Future Partnership alongside Peak District National Park aimed for this new social media campaign to inspire the community to work together to protect the moorlands from wildfire, including helping visitors to know what to bring on days out, what not to bring and what to do if anyone spots a wildfire themselves.
Tim Slack, Digital Marketing Expert at nativve, said: “nativve is a digital marketing and advertising agency based in Sheffield. We have been a member of 1% for the Planet for a number of years, having previously supported The Rivers Trust, Woodland Trust and Protect Our Winters Europe. This year we decided we’d apply our expertise and resources to supporting Moors for the Future Partnership, as all of our team spend time in the unique Peak District landscape and actively participate in outdoor activities in the area. Having worked with numerous outdoor and lifestyle brands over the years including Patagonia, Mammut, Gore-Tex and Teva to develop their audiences and engage them to take specific actions, we felt it was a great fit to work with the Moors for the Future team and develop a strategy to help spread the message of wildfire awareness this summer, especially as the seasonal temperatures rise as a result of climate change.”
Phil Mulligan, Chief Executive, Peak District National Park Authority said: “It is vital we use social media to engage new visitors to the National Park. Millions of new visitors base their trip solely on what they have seen on social media. I welcome this innovation and am grateful to the support from nativve.”
This year the Partnership also trialled digital roadside signs, positioned by busy “gateway” roads between urban centres and the boundary of the National Park. The signs displayed a fire risk rating, from low to extreme, which was updated daily according to the Met Office Fire Severity Index, stating “No fires, no BBQs” (pictured).
Read more on this story on the Moors for the Future Partnership website: The Latest | Moors for the Future
