What is Holding Back Woodland Creation?

Wood For The Trees is a series created by film-maker and outdoor educator Charly Le Marchant and Tom Barnes, who is the Managing Director of Vastern Timber. The series focus on the future of UK forests, covering topics such as rewilding, woodland creation, agroforestry, and much more.

Our Managing Director, Liz Nicholson, recently contributed to one of their videos, focusing on the topic of ‘What is Holding Back Woodland Creation: Why is the UK not meeting government tree planting targets?’.

In this film, Wood For The Trees talk to woodland managers, foresters, rewilders, land owners and campaigners to find out why the UK is not meeting it’s tree planting targets. If there are so many important reasons to plant trees, why are they not being planted?

The government set targets to plant 30,000 hectares of trees per year but the UK is not even halfway towards this. We know there is political ambition and public support to plant more trees, and we know there is public and private financial support available for tree planting and to establish woodland.

To find out what might be holding back woodland creation, they sought out those people involved in establishing large scale woodland creation schemes (or at least trying to do so). This video explains some of the factors and issues involved.