Seeing the woods for the trees

The Government has promised to plant 60 million trees by 2024. It’s a laudable aim, but there are taxing questions to answer about practicalities, such as funding, work force, which species, where to get them from and where to plant them, observes John Grimshaw

- John Grimshaw

TREES form the background to our lives, enriching and beautifying the landscape in towns and country alike and providing quantifiable benefits to wellbeing and social cohesion. Alone or together as woods, they provide habitat for complex ecosystems, ameliorate microclimates, slow the flow of rainfall and capture pollutants, as well as being the source of wood for timber and fuel. Wood is the consequence of perhaps the most important function of trees, the capturing of large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere, releasing oxygen in exchange.

During the December 2019 General Election campaign, all political parties made great claims about the numbers they wanted to see planted: 30 million per year for a five-year term for the Conservatives; 60 million each year until 2045 for the Liberal Democrats. Labour pledged an astonishing two billion by 2040; pundits quickly calculated that this would mean planting 270,000 per day for the whole 20 years.

From last month’s Budget, we now know that the Conservatives have scaled back to the less ambitious 60 million new trees up to 2024, covering ‘an area the size of Birmingham’—the coronavirus crisis may reduce that ambition still further. It’s not nearly enough if the UK is to become carbon neutral by 2050, say environmental campaigners, but even so, translating this pledge to reality begs many weighty questions.

Where will this planting take place? Who will do it? How will it be funded? What form should these woods take—are they only for carbon capture in a natural cycle or are they envisaged as timber sources for the future? And, critically, which trees should we be planting?