The woodlands need your help! As part of the Emergency Tree Fund, the Natural History Consortium are supporting the project by gathering views and insights to contribute to the ongoing success and creation of woodlands across the UK.
Are you a teacher or facilitator? We want to find out how best to integrate learning about trees into formal education. Have you volunteered on projects (whether tree-related or not)? We want to understand what kinds of volunteering opportunities are most appealing and how they can bolster healthy forests. All views on these topics are useful, so please do share via our surveys to help us in our quest to support woodlands and wildlife to flourish and help inform future projects and best practice. Read on for more, or skip to the links below to share your ideas.
The Emergency Tree Fund (ETF) was created and launched by the Woodland Trust to support nature and communities on all things trees and woodland. Projects were supported from spring 2022 to spring 2024 as part of a wider response to the UK Parliament’s 2019 commitment to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; the increased realisation of just how important trees and woods are for our health and well-being afforded by the Covid-19 lockdown, and climate change most broadly.
Many local authorities across the UK have since declared climate and nature emergencies, and some have set out ambitious tree cover and woodland creation targets to begin to work towards alleviating the effects. The ETF aims to help local authorities turn their ambitions into reality, overcome potential barriers, stimulate activity, and provide examples of best practice in innovation and inspiration that can be applied in other local authority areas. For more details of these outcomes, see the 7 points below.
The Woodland Trust created 7 key outcomes to be delivered through the Emergency Tree Fund that will have significant impact and make a demonstrable difference in some or all the following:
- Deliver high quality outcomes for nature recovery through creating new woodland based on the Lawton Principles of bigger, better and more connected, using predominantly native species which are UK and Ireland Sourced and Grown (UKISG).
- Deliver high outcomes for people through creation of high-quality, accessible, greenspaces which support the health and well-being of local communities.
- Deliver high outcomes for climate change through maximising carbon sequestration and increasing resilience of woodlands and tree stocks.
- Deliver high outcomes for water quality and/or flood management.
- Deliver high outcomes for air quality.
- Deliver high outcomes for landscape in terms of landscape character and/or historic environment.
- Deliver high outcomes for soils in terms of conservation and/or restoration.
What are your thoughts? We really want to know! Please use the following links to contribute your ideas:
For teachers, facilitators and educators:
https://bnhc.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/teacher-survey-trees-and-woodlands
For volunteers:
https://bnhc.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/public-trees-and-woodland-volunteering-survey-2
