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.”

Founded in September 1919, the Forestry Commission began essential work to restore England’s forests and woodlands that had been lost during the First World War. Celebrating its centenary year in 2019, our guide looks at the history of the UK’s forests and woodlands, wildlife to spot and the best forests to visit.

An area nearly half the size of London should be planted with new trees every year to help tackle climate change, environmental experts have said.

Covering 70,000 hectares with new woodland across the UK annually would result in a net total of zero carbon emissions from farming, according to the think tank Green Alliance.

London covers 159,000 hectares.

Calling for more ambitious action on greenhouse gas emissions, a report by the alliance also advises the government to introduce a raft of measures including urging people to eat “less and better” meat and more plant-based foods.

The mass tree-planting scheme needs to start immediately to meet the National Farmers Union’s target of net zero carbon emissions from land use by 2040, the alliance believes.

Original article

“The benefits of England’s publicly owned forests were “greatly undervalued” by the planned state sell-off, a government-appointed panel will say on Thursday in a report that deals a new blow to the coalition’s green credentials.

The independent report, seen by the Guardian, says the £20m cost to the state of maintaining the forests and woodlands is “very modest and delivers benefits far in excess of this” and contrasts the sum with the £250m spent on reinstating weekly bin collections.

The independent panel on forestry, led by the bishop of Liverpool, the Right Rev James Jones, was set up after the humiliating U-turn on the proposed sell-off by the environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, whose department had suffered the biggest budget cut inWhitehall.” 

We need to get smarter and more focused in the application of this type of analysis and to develop the skills to do it at the local level if we are to produced rounded policies in the context of the natural assets we manage for communities.