A new charter – and a new chance – for trees in the UK

 

 

I wanted to write something about the launch of the tree charter on 6 November, which hasn’t been widely covered in the media, but I did find this great piece by Boudicca Fox-Leonard (what a name!) in the Telegraph that seems to cover most of what I wanted to say, which either means I’m not nearly as original as I thought I was, or I’m in exalted company in thinking along the same lines as Ms Fox-Leonard!

Her piece begins with a wonderful sentence: ‘In slides the shovel, out comes a clod of earth; a delicate sapling is dropped into the neat hole and soil repacked around it.’ She mentions the fact that our percentage of tree cover in the UK is far below the European average. Across the UK it stands at around 13 per cent and in England it is just 10 per cent. Compare this to France (36.76%), Spain (36.7%), Italy (35%) and Germany (32%). Even allowing for the fact that Britain is an island with a high population density, the comparison is enormously unfavourable, yet 2016 was the worst year for planting on record. She also points out that the government pledged to plant 11 million trees by 2020 and that this pledge is unlikely to be kept. In other words, not enough is being done to improve the situation.

Why do I think it is important that more trees are planted? I have two main answers to that question – the first is personal; and the second is more about the benefits that I believe trees provide to our society as a whole.

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