The Big Climate Fightback
The UK’s largest ever tree-planting campaign has been launched by the Woodland Trust, the charity that protects the UK’s forests. It is called the Big Climate Fightback, and the Woodland Trust is asking a million people to sign up and promise to plant a tree. It will also send 700,000 free trees to schools. On 30 November, during Tree Week, there will be events across the country when the trees will be planted.
The Woodland Trust wants people to plant trees because they help tackle climate change. Climate change means long-term changes in world weather patterns, caused by rising temperatures. Human activities such as burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas), farming and cutting down forests are big causes of climate change.
Trees take carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere to help them grow. CO2 is a type of greenhouse gas (GHG) – these are gases that are known to make climate change worse.
The UK’s Committee on Climate Change has said that the UK must plant 1.5 billion trees by 2050 if it wants to reduce the country’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other GHGs to “net zero”. This means the amount going into the air from things like homes, factories, farms, power stations and transport is balanced out by the amount removed by trees, so that the overall, or net, increase in these harmful gases in our atmosphere is zero.
To meet this target, GHG emissions have to be reduced and about 300 square kilometres of woodland need to be planted across the UK each year until 2050. That‘s about 45,000 football pitches!
Unfortunately, at the moment, planting rates are not meeting this target. For example, last year the Government only managed to create 14.2 square kilometres of new woodland.