A short guide to UK forestry’s least-worst response to climate change
The more our emissions heat the planet, the more we narrow our range of good options: the sooner we act, the more we mitigate climate change’s impact on our civilisation.
Trees are critical to any sustainable future. Britain can show the way by urgently passing legislation summarised in the following ten words:
Safely Plant More Diverse Tree Species in New Woodlands Now
Executive Summary
- Plant Seeds: Formulate action plan. You’re reading a first draft
- Prepare Ground: Inform, educate and entertain the public about the new legislation
- Fertilise Seedlings: Recruit trusted, credible endorsers, supporters & influencers
- Schedule Planting: Identify the next Parliamentary bill to introduce new legislation
- Select landowner(s): Establish best Parliamentary route to pass this legislation
- Nurture Saplings: Assemble lawyers, politicians & forestry experts to draft loophole-free, enforcement-heavy legislation
- Plant Saplings: Pass bill into law
- Manage Forest: Monitor, enforce, update
The Bald Facts
- Bald Britain: With 13% forest cover, Britain is Europe’s 3rd-baldest country. Only Ireland and Malta have a lower percentage. The European average is 38%. Finland is 75%. Global average is 31%.
- Tree-mendous: Trees are unambiguously good. Trees are the only carbon-capture ‘technology’ proven to work at scale, and they prevent floods, preserve soil, filter pollution, promote biodiversity, and provide sustainable building materials, fuel and food.
- Reforestation: The current government target is to raise Britain’s tree cover to 16.5% by 2050. This requires planting 30,000 hectares a year. We’re currently not even planting half that number.
- Nurseries: The biggest bottleneck in meeting even this unambitious goal is not lack of land or willing landowners, but the supply of British nurseries to grow saplings (saplings are much more efficient to plant than seeds, but carry a greater biosecurity hazard if imported).
- Culture: Britain has an unusual cultural divide separating farmers from foresters (most European farmers see trees as crops that take longer to mature, rather than a separate line of business). This means UK regulation tends to treat farming and forestry as distinct sectors.
- Native-only: 2.5% of British trees are ‘ancient woodland’, with strict rules on ‘native species only’ to preserve ecosystems and maintain biodiversity.
- Plantations: The vast majority of British trees grow in commercial plantations. They are subject to fewer restrictions on what species can be planted, but still ‘guided’ by the Native Good, Non-Native Bad mantra.
How can we stop our forests dying?
‘Safely Plant More Diverse Tree Species in New Woodlands Now’ is hard to fit onto a placard, but comprehensive.
Condensing into a simple slogan all the complexities, nuances, trade-offs, variables and interactions of an ecosystem-level polycrisis has its challenges.
Here’s an expanded version of that 10-word slogan. It’s taken from one of the few non-specialist articles reporting on the 2023 release of a Forestry Commission-funded ‘horizon scan’ assessing the future of Britain’s forests and woodlands:
- Safely: introducing non-native species will require elevated vigilance against importing pathogens. See Dutch saplings and sweet chestnut mentioned above
- Plant: trees take ages to grow, as we may have mentioned. For a better future, we need to plant seeds or saplings now
- More: 13% tree cover is nowhere near enough for the UK. Come to that, 31% probably isn’t ‘enough’ for the global average
- Diverse Species: short, restrictive lists of approved native species served us well in the past, but in a past when we could confidently predict the average temperature in 100 years time would be much the same as it is today. We can no longer confidently predict what the average temperature will be in 10 years time. This means we need to test now how different tree species from a range of degrees south for northern hemisphere countries like Britain (and degrees north for southern hemisphere countries) adapt to new habitats. To be crystal clear, this means expanding the list of approved species to include non-native, ‘exotic’ or ‘foreign’ species. Functionally, they all mean the same thing, though you can guess which adjectives Sun sub editors will choose. The point is that they’ve proved themselves adapted to hotter temperatures
- New Woodlands: not ancient woodlands, or mature woodlands. They have the capacity to adapt over time through ‘rewilding’. We’re talking about the monocultural plantations that currently exist, which form the majority of British woodlands, and the future plantations that need to exist as soon as possible
- Now: this is the key part. We can’t dither any longer
[From ‘Safely Plant More Diverse Tree Species In New Woodlands Now’, See Through News website, November 2023]
The challenge now facing our lawmakers and politicians is how to translate this slogan into effective, loophole-free, enforceable legislation, Now.
You’re probably already formulating the ‘buts’ in your head.
Urgent, united, co-ordinated action
Trees aren’t the only species stressed by rapid climate change.
Humans like to think of ourselves as particularly adept at adapting to new environments, but the speed of climate change, plus the decades trees take to mature, make a New Tree Deal particularly urgent.
Shifts in attitudes can take generations. We may only have a year or two to start changing the rules, incentives, grants, public opinion etc. required to prevent our forests dying during our lifetimes.
We’ve all grown up with the ‘native good, non-native bad’ mantra. Tearing up our ‘native only’ approved list songsheets, and conducting all interested parties to sing a new tune, requires:
- Bold political leadership
- Patient, pervasive, persistent, imaginative storytelling
- Careful stakeholder management to convince doubters a radical shake-up of forestry policy is in all our long-term interests
How to overcome the forces of inertia?
First, listen to the experts, both the professors in our universities and the practitioners who work in the woods.
Here are examples of two voices singing the same tune in different registers.
Listen To The Scientists
Forestry experts have been sounding the alarm with increasing volume. Like trees falling in an empty wood, no one appears to be hearing them.
Maybe because trees take so long to mature, and we see them all around us, we assume there’s no problem, even when logic dictates that this should make action even more urgent.
Farmers can respond to climate change by adjusting the annual crops they plant year by year. By the time the next generation of foresters discovers we planted the wrong trees thirty years ago, there may be no woodlands left for them to manage.
It’s hard to name any aspect of forestry that global heating hasn’t impacted negatively.
46 of the UK’s top tree experts recently co-authored a ‘horizon scan’ to ’identify developing issues likely to affect UK forest management within the next 50 years’.
As you’ll see, their academic tone was punctuated by desperation.
As the forest management sector naturally operates over long timescales, the importance of using good foresight is self-evident. We followed a tried-and-tested horizon scanning methodology involving a diverse Expert Panel to collate and prioritise a longlist of 180 issues.
The issues represent a diverse range of themes, within a spectrum of influences from environmental shocks and perturbations to changing political and socio-economic drivers, with complex emerging interactions between them.
The most highly ranked issue was ‘Catastrophic forest ecosystem collapse’, reflecting agreement that not only is such collapse a likely prospect but it would also have huge implications across the sector and wider society. These and many of the other issues are large scale, with far-reaching implications.
We must be careful to avoid inaction through being overwhelmed, or indeed to merely focus on ‘easy wins’ without considering broader ramifications. Our responses to each of the challenges and opportunities highlighted must be synergistic and coherent, involving landscape-scale planning.
A more adaptive approach to forest management will be essential, encouraging continual innovation and learning. We hope that this stimulates greater recognition of how our forests and sector may need to change to be fit for the future.
In some cases, these changes will need to be fundamental and momentous.
[From ‘A horizon scan of issues affecting UK forest management within 50 years’ by Tew et al, published in Forestry: An International Journal of Forest Research, Volume 97, Issue 3, July 2024]
The horizon scan ranked the major challenges to forestry over the next generation, nearly all the result of human-induced climate change. They list new tree diseases thriving as temperatures rise, invasive pests that our warmer winters no longer kill off, and myriad other unintended consequences our determination to continue burning fossil fuels is having on our ecosystem.
Despite their rising panic at our complacency, academics must use qualified, low-key language, or risk being accused of being unscientific.
What might ‘a more adaptive approach to forest management’ mean in practice?
Best ask those whose livelihoods depend on the woods.
Listen to the Practitioners
Britain’s best-known and most widely-respected woodsman is probably Ben Law.
Unaffiliated to any institution, Ben’s deep woodland knowledge is based on his observations of the 100 acres of Sussex woodland in which he’s lived and worked for most of his adult life.
Ben regularly visits woodlands in other parts of the UK. No one knows Prickly Nut Wood better.
Using traditional coppicing methods, Ben has made a living from the same sweet chestnut coppice ‘stools’ that provided ‘cut-and-come-again’ timber for his predecessors over at least 400 years.
Ben has taught dozens of apprentices. Well-thumbed copies of his books on woodland management can be found in forests and woodland around the world. He’s happy to pass on his hard-acquired expertise in one of the very few remaining examples of human activity that’s not only sustainable, but actively promotes biodiversity.
Ben’s first attempt at building, a cruck-framed house to replace his bivouac, was made from natural materials gathered from in and around Prickly Nut Wood. The sweet chestnut and larch poles, straw-bales and lime render for walls, shingles and cladding and foundation stones all came from a mile or so away.
‘The Man Who Built His House In The Woods’ was featured in the long-running UK housebuilding TV show Grand Designs, and remains its all-time most popular episode. Ben has built dozens more sustainable buildings locally. He also teaches courses in the re-discovered craft of roundwood timber framing, but natural building is just one way he makes his living from the woods.
Every year he cuts a new ‘cant’, opening up a new part of the woodland to light, stimulating new growth, endemic species of plants and wildlife that have evolved to the same patchwork rhythm. Ben and his apprentices convert the coppiced wood into various materials for building, fencing and gardening, rustic furniture, yurt poles, using the offcuts for charcoal and firewood, in a manner previous in Prickly Nut Wood coppice workers would have recognised centuries ago.
So what does someone so steeped in tradition think about how we should manage our woodlands now? Ben was recently interviewed for a follow-up to a year-long observational documentary following him teaching his two apprentices in 2012/13, being released via YouTube in 2024/25, in synch with the seasons in which they were filmed. Here’s what he’s learned over the past few years:
When I first started working in the woods, I was very much a native species advocate. That whole ecosystem was built up with native species, native plants, the wildlife and the biodiversity that needs those particular plants, or has adapted to those particular plants over time. And that to me felt like the most ecological type of woodland we could have.
However, things have changed. I’ve seen an increase in tree diseases, I can see warmer summers we’re having, and the effect that’s having on trees. Virtually every few weeks it seems like we’re getting a new form of tree disease attacking particular trees. It’s quite scary, the volume of tree diseases here. Not just that, also the predators, the wood-boring insects coming in because the climate is warmer.
Now why is that? Is it purely down to poor biosecurity? Possibly, but a lot of it has to do with trees being at a stress point because their climate is changing. So when I look at that it makes me feel differently about what we need to do for the future.
The bottom line to me is that change is occurring in our woodlands, whether we do nothing, or we do something. If we do nothing, then it will evolve in whatever way evolves, and it may mean we’ve going to end up with a lot of dead woodland.
Change is going to occur in our woodlands, whether we like it or not. The climate is making that happen.
So what do we do as a species? Do we sit back and do nothing, or do we actually make a conscious effort to start planting climate-resilient woodlands for the future?
[From Episode 9 of Ben Law’s Woodland Year, See Through Together Productions, due for release autumn 2025 (Episode 1, Meet Ben, here).]
What Next?
Ben, the professors and forestry researchers agree on the three key steps required to give our woodlands the best chance of still being around for our children and grandchildren.
- Source seed: high-quality seed for new species from up to 10 degrees of latitude south
- New nurseries: take an acre (or, say, 5%) from every arable farm and turn it into a tree nursery to reduce the biosecurity risk of importing saplings
- New plantations: plant a wide variety of a) native species, b) similar species adapted to hotter environments, and c) ‘wild cards’ from even more extreme climates, as insurance in case global heating gets much worse, to give us time to identify which species will thrive in our new climate.
The devil, as always, is in the detail. That’s up to politicians, legislators, and experts to convert into tightly-worded legal clauses, and future governments to monitor and enforce. The tools are the same: regulation, taxation, incentives, grants, schemes, education.
If current funds can be better directed, climate-resilient woodland management may not even cost any more than current policies. Once costed, it may even save money. There are risks, naturally, including unknowable ones.
But the biggest risk is the guaranteed, known risk of inaction.
Budgetary considerations are dwarfed by our priceless, complex, many and varied dependencies on trees, and offset by the credibility and reputational gain that will redound upon any politician, party, professor or practitioner who helps prevent our grandchildren from wandering around dead woodlands, wondering why we did nothing.
- To learn more about the See Through network’s plans to Safely Plant More Diverse Tree Species in New Woodlands Now, email: info@seethroughnews.org
- To join See Through’s global network of pro bono experts working to Speed Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active, email: volunteer@seethroughnews.org