While businesses and charities lead the way, the lack of strategy at the top is shameful
Sun 24 Nov 2019 09.30 GMT
Ethiopia launched a national tree planting drive in July this year – and planted 350m in one day. Photograph: Michael Tewelde/AFP/Getty Images
Tree planting is suddenly the zeitgeist. Tabloid newspapers, utility companies and oil corporations are pledging to plant trees by the million, in some cases before Christmas. Even the Brexit party is on to it. The Woodland Trust has launched its “big climate fightback”. This Thursday, on Channel 5, Chris Packham and John Humphrys host Plant a Tree to Save the World.
It’s not as catchy as Plant a Tree in ’73, the last time tree planting genuinely caught the public imagination. Then, the government launched a national tree planting campaign as a response to Dutch elm disease. Today, NGOs and businesses are leading the way while successive, recent governments have made unambitious pledges, which they have failed to keep. There is no national tree planting strategy in England. It is shameful. Meanwhile, we are losing ash trees by the million to ash dieback.
In July, Ethiopia began a huge nationwide strategy in which 350m trees were planted in one day (at current rates in England and Wales, this would take us 140 years). In 2017, 1.5 million Indian volunteers planted 66m trees in 12 hours in Madhya Pradesh. The government in New Zealand launched a plan to plant a billion trees by 2027 (including 83m this year). In Pakistan, the programme to plant a billion trees to combat the effects of climate change was completed ahead of schedule in 2017. Their new target is 10bn trees.
Trees mitigate climate change and tree planting is now recognised as one of the best ways to tackle this global crisis
I will plant trees on the edge of my small woodland in the Black Mountains this week – birch, aspen, field maple and a dozen tiny oaks that I grew from acorns – as I have done every year for a decade and a half. In the community woodland I help manage, we’ll continue to plant diverse species under the ash we expect to lose. My neighbour, Keith Powell, is finalising plans to plant 175,000 broadleaf trees on the upland common behind our homes.
Trees give life. It’s hard to overstate their benefit. They are fundamental to our rural and urban landscapes, our lives and the future of this planet. Trees reduce soil degradation on farms, provide vital habitat for wildlife, supply us with food, heat and medicine, safeguard water quality, give shade, build biodiversity and create spaces to walk lightly and breathe deeply in our cities. Trees diminish flood risk, improve air quality by absorbing pollution and yield a renewable resource in the form of timber. Most importantly, in the climate emergency, trees sequester carbon. They absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, storing it in their trunks, branches and roots, before releasing oxygen back into the air. Trees mitigate climate change and tree planting is now recognised as one of the best ways to tackle this global crisis.
Some of the trees I planted 15 years ago are nearly 10 metres tall. Watching them grow and turn with the seasons reminds me that time passes, which encourages me to live as well as I can. I won’t be around to see most of these trees reach maturity, but that is the point: if you take the trouble to plant trees now, someone may walk through your woodland or down your street a century or more into the future and think well of you, even though they don’t know your name.
Planting a tree is also, for me, a simple act of faith. As the American poet W S Merwin wrote: “On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.” We have to engage, as families and schools, as communities and as a nation, on fixing the future. We cannot wait for the government to lead on tree planting. We have to do it ourselves. And the time is now.
Rob Penn is the author of The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees