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We need 1.5bn trees in the UK to tackle the climate crisis. But planting them badly can be counterproductive – here are the do’s and don’ts
Last November, amid the charged and turbulent weeks of Cop26, I found myself on a sunlit hillside in the Brecon Beacons watching saplings being planted. Families – grandparents, parents, grandchildren – followed a rugged tractor track snowy with autumnal willowherb, each carrying a foot-high tree destined for a high hillside above the steep valley. With world leaders in Glasgow deciding our planet’s future, this felt like a pretty good place to be: witnessing an optimistic, physical gesture of climate action amid so much talk. “Hope is taking action,” Greta Thunberg declared in her lauded “blah, blah, blah” speech at Milan’s Youth4Climate conference last September.
With their natural capacity to sequester carbon – to draw it from the atmosphere and lock it up as wood – trees are a simple, easy-to-understand way of tackling the climate emergency. Indeed, the most headline-grabbing action ultimately pledged at Cop26 was an end to deforestation by 2030.
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