Spending on trees in UK falls despite pledges to plant more
I’ve just come back from a walk in the woods at Sheringham Park and could therefore not resist starting with this story one of the many landscape issues that links rural and urban places.
Spending on trees and forestry fell by nearly £20m a year between 2015 and 2018, when a purely Conservative government had taken over from the coalition, despite pledges to plant more trees.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said £132m was spent across the UK on trees in 2017-18, down from £151m in 2014-15. The more recent total included £32m in England, with most of the rest spent in Scotland.
The figures equate to less than £1 per person in England and less than £2 per person across the UK, compared with annual spending of about £90 per person on roads, £150pp on fossil fuel subsidies and £135pp in foregone tax from the nine-year freeze on fuel duty.
Subsidising fossil fuel production overseas costs each UK taxpayer more than £7 a year, according to estimates from Friends of the Earth.
Trees became an unexpected electoral battleground over the weekend when the Tories pledged to plant 30m new trees a year and the Liberal Democrats promised 60m.
Emi Murphy, a trees campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “We’re calling for the next government to properly fund the doubling of tree cover.
“This is one of the key solutions to solving the climate crisis but has been shockingly underfunded for years. Faced with the climate emergency and the dire impacts it will bring, we simply cannot afford not to fund trees.”