Households to be offered free tree to plant in Wales

EVERY household in Wales is to be offered a free tree to plant as part of a scheme to tackle climate change, the Welsh Government has announced.

The scheme will give people the chance to choose a tree of their own to plant or have one planted on their behalf by Coed Cadw, the Woodland Trust.

Trees will be available to collect from March from one of five regional community hubs, with 20 more hubs to be established across Wales by next October.

Deputy minister for climate change Lee Waters said the project is estimated to cost around £2m.

Visiting one of the trust’s woodland creation projects near Gnoll Park in Neath, Mr Waters said he hoped the campaign would inspire families to go on planting trees themselves in the future.

“We need to plant lots more trees to meet our climate change targets by the end of this decade – we have to plant 86 million more trees in Wales,” he said.

“Our tree-planting record has not been great and we need to increase it by 15-fold every year. That is a massive challenge.

“We want households to play their part. We’ve issued a call to arms really.

“If every household planted a tree, we’d have a million trees planted.

“But it’s also about awarenessraising and getting people to think about nature and the role trees can have.

“Our message is trees are amazing – we’ve been neglecting them, we need to plant lots, lots more of them and you and your family can play your part.”

Mr Waters admitted individual tree-planting was not the answer to reaching the target, and said the landowners of Wales, such as farmers, would need to embrace tree growth for the country to see a real difference.

It is believed that around 10% of land used for food production needs to be turned into woodland.

“Primarily we need farmers to be planting more trees on their land,” Mr Waters said.

“Ten per cent is not a huge shift. There’s good practical reasons for why trees can help farmers go about their normal business.

“We’re also going to be changing the subsidy regime so farmers are incentivised to do it.

“There’s a lot of anxiety in the farming community at the moment and it’s easy to see the tree as the boogeyman – actually trees are a part of the solution of how we deal with the current crisis and it needn’t be at the expense of farming.”

A consultation on plans to create a national forest for Wales will launch early next year, he said.

“We seriously need to plant a massive amount of trees, as well as doing a pile of other things, if we’re going to avoid the catastrophe of climate change,” he said.