Free trees for all households as Wales aims to cut carbon

A FREE tree to plant in your garden is being offered to every household in Wales in a climate change push.

The scheme will give people the chance to choose a tree 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 hubs, with 20 more centres to be established across Wales by next October.

Lee Waters, deputy minister for climate change, said the project was estimated to cost around £2million.

Visiting one of the trust’s woodland creation projects near Gnoll Park in Neath, South Wales, Mr Waters said: “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.”

“Our tree-planting record has not been great and we need to increase it 15-fold every year. That is a massive challenge. We want households to play their part. If every household planted a tree, we’d have a million trees planted. But it’s also about awareness raising and getting people to think about nature.

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

Mr Waters said around 10 per cent of land used for food production needed to be turned into woodland. “Primarily we need farmers to be planting more trees on their land,” he said.

“Ten per cent is not a huge shift. There’s good practical reasons 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 anxiety in the farming community at the moment and it’s easy to see the tree as the bogeyman – 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.”

Mr Waters said the government wanted to follow Belfast council in creating a heat map of where people would like trees planted, and encouraged everyone to get in touch with suggestions.

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.

Natalie Buttriss, of Coed Cadw, said: “We are delighted to be working with the Welsh Government to get thousands of native trees in the ground. We want people from all backgrounds to be planting the national forest for Wales.”