In 2018, about 1,400 hectares of trees were planted in England, against a government target of 5,000 hectares. Less than £1 per person per year is spent on planting English trees, and less than £2 across the UK, according to estimates by Friends of the Earth, compared with £90 per person per year on roads and £150 on fossil fuel subsidies. Scotland has succeeded in planting more trees, but the UK is still one of the least wooded countries in Europe, with only 13% tree cover, compared with about 32% in Germany and 31% of France. Those trees are also unevenly distributed: tree cover is about 10% in England, 15% in Wales, 19% in Scotland, and only 8% in Northern Ireland.

The reasons for the lack of woodland across the UK stretch back centuries, from the timber needed for ships to bolster the empire’s navy and the industrial revolution, to the first world war, when the countryside was so denuded that the government set up the Forestry Commission in 1919 to reforest emptied land and provide a national resource to meet future needs.

More recent impediments to forest-growing have included the complicated nature of agri-environment subsidies and for decades a farming policy focused on intensifying food production over environmental gains. Farmers and landowners have had little incentive to take a punt on slow-growing forests, which carry substantial upfront costs but no financial return for decades, while cash-strapped local authorities have had other spending priorities.

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The Committee on Climate Change, the government’s statutory adviser, has suggested that to meet the target of net zero carbon by 2050, we need to plant at least 30,000 hectares of new trees every year.

The Woodland Trust sees new woodland planting as one of the three main aims for forestry in the UK: protection of existing sites; restoration of degraded woodland; and creation of new forests. The trust is one of four charities supported by the 2019 Guardian and Observer climate emergency appeal.

Just growing more trees is not that simple, however. The UK’s recent history holds many examples of hapless forestry schemes gone awry. The Forestry Commission was responsible for some of them, with plantations in its early years that failed to provide a strategic reserve of the sort of timber needed. More recently, in the 1980s, peatlands, bogs and moorlands were planted with conifer, with environmentally damaging results, because planting trees on peatland dries out the soil, whereas peat in its natural state can act as a powerful carbon sink. The regimented monocultural conifer plantations can still be seen in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest TheWoodland Trust has said hundreds of thousands of people have signed up to a mass tree-planting campaign to tackle climate change. Photograph: Jill Jennings/WTML/PA

If the UK is to meet its targets without further collateral damage to native peatlands, wildlife and scenery, past mistakes must be avoided. “It’s about the right tree in the right place,” says Darren Moorcroft, chief executive of the Woodland Trust. “Trees can provide carbon capture, but also clean water, fresher air and flood alleviation, if they are planted with care.” Native broadleaf woodlands are often more suitable than the timber-producing conifer forests, and varying the species planted means they are less vulnerable to disease than monocultures.

Planting a new woodland from scratch costs roughly £6,000 a hectare, or £3.80 per tree, according to the Woodland Trust, but there are many variables. The land that is planted may have previously been farmland, or other land up for sale from private hands, or in public ownership. The Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Wood, for instance, was formerly a UK Coal site bought by the charity.

Heartwood Forest in Hertfordshire, with 600,000 trees that were all planted by volunteers, was formerly farmland that was up for sale. According to the Woodland Trust, “local people were worried it was going to be houses, so were delighted when we consulted on our plans”. The wood is now well used as a local amenity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bluebells flower in Heartwood Forest near St Albans, where 600,000 trees were all planted by volunteers. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA-EFE

The Woodland Trust, which has planted more than 43m trees since 1972 with more than 15 million people involved, works closely with local communities, consulting on large-scale projects to convert land to woods, and sometimes through community groups that have contacted the charity. “It’s rare that people aren’t happy to see a woodland being created for them,” says a spokesman. The charity decides what sort of woodland and its design through working with local people.

“We find that by engaging with local communities to create and plant the site, there is much more buy-in and support for the new woods, as they feel like it’s theirs.”

Rob Draper, manager of the Grange Farm Centre, a 90-acre community facility in Chigwell, Essex, has applied successfully for free community tree packs from the Woodland Trust for more than a decade, and has built up a woodland next to a local housing estate that now plays home to barn owls, great crested newts, beehives and a wide variety of small mammals and birds. Blackthorn, elder, rowan and hazel have all begun to bear fruit, and hornbeam, hawthorn, crab apple and dogwood have been planted as hedging.

“People probably don’t realise that they can get free trees from the Woodland Trust, but we would encourage people to apply. At first we were nervous about completing the forms, as we weren’t sure we would be successful, but since then we’ve applied most seasons successfully,” says Draper. “[Local people volunteering gained] a sense of purpose and structure in terms of seeing how project develops. And they had the opportunity to learn about the benefits of spending time outdoors, in a green space, and the improved health and wellbeing that results.”