English The LWA welcomes the government commitment to planting more trees, to protecting our existing woodland, to improving urban tree cover, and to having a coherent strategy. An ambitious, overarching plan with the resources to back it up, has been sorely missing for decades .
However, unfortunately, the England Tree Strategy has the makings of a massive missed opportunity.
In the light of the incessant and numerous reports which outline the depth of the nature and climate crisis we are in, this consultation document is devastatingly short on actual practical proposals.
Of the very few specific metrics proposed, 30,000 new hectares of woodland is way short of what is needed- by about a factor of 100! Three million new hectares in ten years is closer to what we need.
Most of the rest of the proposals consist of ‘Support for …’, ‘better access to…’, ‘outreach to…’. No one could argue with the need for more understanding, more community involvement, more resources, but this consultation makes virtually no specific proposals to allow people to comment on real world details or priorities.
The £640 million in a Nature for Climate Fund, that was announced in the budget 2020, is a good start, but again is short by at least a factor of 10 – especially in the light of the hundreds of billions spent on the coronavirus.
The trouble with consultations like this are threefold –leaving aside concerns about who it will reach and who has the time and resources to fill it in.
a) It entails various assumptions for which there is no place to comment or input, and is in fact undermined by its own assumptions, and other government activity
If the assumptions are wrong, then the whole basis of the consultation is undermined.
The most glaring of these is the acceptance of 2050 as the target date for reaching ‘net zero’ emissions. Independent scientists recognise that this date needs to be far earlier, more like 2030, given the urgency of the climate crisis, and the accumulation of emissions that a path to 2050 will entail.
It also is undermined by the governments own existing policies. The document says that government is committed to the protection of ‘irreplaceable’ ancient woodland. Yet the current work on HS2 threatens loss or damage to 108 ancient woodlands – according to the Woodland Trust – with 32 directly affected by phase 1 alone. At a potential cost of £307 million per one mile of track, ( The Guardian, 3 Feb 2020) where is the consistency or the policies to make us trust the proposals? £307m could pay for planting up 76,000 Ha of trees right there (£2/tree at 2000 pHa)
There is no question to allow us to comment on the Government’s continued underfunding of biodiversity and the 47% cut in funding to Natural England since 2010 (WildlifeTrusts.org)
b) It references other government documents which themselves may be deficient but for which there is no place to comment effectively.
Examples here are the Forestry Standard, which is retained as the benchmark for new woodland proposals. But the Forestry Standard is 230 pages long, and cant realistically be used by local woodland workers and practitioners as a working guide. It was first published in 1998, and so has overseen the loss and deterioration of thousands of acres of UK woodland in that time, and the continued lack of good management over much of our woodlands. It needs to be re-written.
It also takes the 25 year Environment Plan aim to achieve 75% of our SSSI’s to be in favourable condition by 2042. Read that again. Despite a government claiming to prioritise the environment, they aim to have a quarter of our very best and most precious ecological sites still being in a poor and deteriorating state in 22 YEARS. Where is the ambition in that?. It would be reasonable to say 70-80% should be favourable in 5 years, and 100% favourable in ten years – and impose significant penalties alongside providing resources for management, where there is failure. But there is no option to comment along those lines.
c) And the questions are arbitrarily limited and constrained.
In some places one has to choose two or three from a list, in some places one has to rank choices in order – but there is no explanation of what the thinking is behind those limitations. So one may think all the options are good, and to choose two is a false choice. And to rank potential efforts in an ascending order one needs to know the detail of how they will be rolled out, for which there is no explanation at all.
But leaving that aside and looking at the existing questions.
The bulk of the questions address the various barriers to creating new woodland, planting more trees and protecting existing ones, and we are asked to choose between things like: simplifying paperwork and regulation, sharing best practice, providing support to land managers, or more grants and loans.
But it should already be clear that we need to do a range of things like this to address the crisis we are in, and the real question are what should be our targets, how much money do we need to spend, how can we do that most efficiently, and how can we get the right information and resources to the right people? Which of their options we should prioritise depends on how they are rolled out in practice, and we don’t know yet, because there is no proposal.
There are two key factors in why we are in such a crisis, (leaving aside wider social and cultural/economic theory); there is not enough understanding of the problems, the solutions and the benefits of taking a more ecological approach, and theres not enough money and other resources to do it, even for the people who want to do so. (There is a third factor, that the people who do have the money do not have an obligation to use it for good, or the political situation prevents them, but that is to get more sociological).
Getting education to our children and our communities and our forest industry workers and farmers, and following it up with the resources to allow people to act, is the key to making the changes we need to. And how we do that is the question to discuss and consult on – not whether managing our woods, or ‘agroforestry’ or ‘planting native woodland ‘ is the best route to net zero (Q29) . They are all necessary.
Despite all this, LWA wants to play its part and we have answered the questions as best we can. The problems we face are too entrenched for us to turn our back on the government – which is the only institution that has the ability – as we have seen with the pandemic – to spend literally anything it wants to, to deal with a serious enough problem.
If the government was to accept the proposals in the the LWA own Forestry Manifesto, we would be very happy to sit down and discuss the detail of how we can best achieve our targets.
The document is full of fine words, which we heartily agree with in terms of the objectives. But the planet and its wildlife and its human population can no longer afford merely fine words to cover up a failure of commitment and political action.
