Vote for Trees

Conservatives talk of planting 30.000,000 tree, LibDems promise 60,000,000. That's just under one tree per person. At a normal planting density for broadleaf woodland of about 1500 trees per hectare, sixty million would cover 400 of Britains 200,000 square kilometres, some 0.2% of the land area.
Compare that figure with the 8% or 16,000 square kilometres of grouse moor, an artificial habitat that was covered in woodland before people cut the trees down.

The gulf between these political election promises and what is required to restore our ecosystems and begin to mitigate the climate emergency shows the depth of our crisis of politics.

Meanwhile the Green Party has a rather more grown-up approach than shouting numbers at each other, but the implications take forestry onto a quite different order of magnitude.

Green Party Policy Forestry

Take this Policy Objective: "Increase the area of cover in the UK to average cover across Europe."

And what would that look like? Nothing like what the promise from the Tories and LibDems, that's for sure.

Picture credit: By Radom1967 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76182177

This article by Damian Carrington has a much more realistic framing of the issue than the Tories and LibDems have managed. The talk here is on one and a half billion trees.