The first wildlife highway to enable animals and plants to escape the worst effects of climate change will be announced today. A corridor 30 miles (50km) long and up to 10 miles wide is to be created in the Severn Vale in Gloucestershire to provide an escape route for wildlife.

Animals will be able to use the corridor like a road so that when temperatures caused by global warming become too much for them they are able to move to cooler areas.

The scheme involves returning land to a wild condition and linking up sections. In some areas small changes will be made, such as ensuring that a ditch between two areas of wetland remains filled with water.

Birds such as snipe and curlew, mammals including otters, harvest mice and hares, and rare invertebrates will be among the beneficiaries of the scheme. Among the plants that will be helped are mousetails, which need boggy terrain.

Forecasts say that climate change in the next half century will force wildlife to shift 250 miles north if it is to remain in the same temperature range as that in which it lives today. For many species the move will be prevented because suitable habitat is limited.

The scheme by the Gloucester Wildlife Trust is designed to provide plants and animals with suitable habitats that will act as stepping stones across the landscape. The scheme is limited initially to the Severn Vale but negotiations with conservationists and landowners in neighbouring regions have already begun in the hope that wildlife highways can be established across Britain.

Twelve strategic nature areas, each of about 500 hectares (1.235 acres), have been identfied for habitat restoration and improved management as part of the five-year project, which is costing £500,000.

“If wildlife can’t move it won’t be able to adapt to climate changes that are already happening, so species will stop breeding and eventually, over time, disappear from ever larger areas of the countryside,” Gordon McGlone, the chief executive of the trust, said. “The Severn Vale is the ideal place to establish our first wildlife highway. It’s rich in wildlife and the course of the river provides a natural route north east from the Bristol Channel up into the Midlands and beyond.”

He said that the creation of an escape route is a new approach for conservationists, who have concentrated previously on providing reserves which, while offering a refuge, do little to help wildlife respond to climate change.

“Wildlife that has happily lived on our reserves for 40 years won’t survive the next 40 years unless we start linking up habitats so it can move and adapt,” he said.

Winning the support of farmers and landowners is vital to the project and conservationists intend to work with them to identify simple measures that can be invaluable for wildlife. The measures are likely to include changing livestock grazing patterns to prevent pasture becoming too uniform and managing water resources so that some land remains damp all year.

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