Plans for a new national forest in the west of England that could cover anything up to 50,000 hectares by 2050 and involve the planting of 20 million trees have been announced.
The Western Forest will encompass a huge area from Weston-super-Mare and Warminster south of Bristol to Stroud and Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds.
It will target five priority areas – which will also include a large chunk of the Mendips and between Swindon and Cirencester – where the aim is to increase woodland cover to 20 per cent by 2030 and to 30 per cent by 2050.
The average forest cover in the UK is 13 per cent, but it’s only 10 per cent in England. The Government has set a legally binding target of 16.5 per cent by 2050, but the latest figures suggest only 5,500 hectares a year are being planted in England.
The project will be managed by the Forest of Avon, which has been given a £7.5 million grant by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), but chief executive Alex Stone says it will pull in finance from other sources, including other government grants and programmes such as the Environmental Land Management farming subsidy scheme (ELMS).
Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG), which leverages money from developers to offset wildlife losses from where they build, will also be targeted.
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“How much private finance are we aiming to draw in? All I would say is that we are aiming to multiply that £7.5 million from the government as many times as possible,” Stone says. “We’ve recently had a project called the Lower Chew Forest [in Somerset] which obtained funding from Defra, a loan from Triodos Bank and from crowd-funding and other sources.”
The Western Forest – which replicates the success of the original National Forest in the East Midlands – has several goals. One is to increase access for people to woodlands, while another is to create sustainable income streams for farmers and other landowners through agro-forestry.
The Western Forest will also support projects such as a partnership between Wiltshire Wildlife Trust and the National Trust at Great Chalfield in Wiltshire. Here the aim is to create a mix of habitats, including species-rich grasslands and wood pastures.
Another aim, says Stone, is to monitor how the new woodlands benefit wildlife. “We want to record baseline data for as many sites as we can so we can see the difference,” she adds. “They’re doing that in the Forest of Cornwall and seeing incredible changes through the agro-forestry project."
Main image: forest in England. Credit: Getty
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