Exploring Woodland Creation Opportunities
These pages explore the landscape opportunities for creating woodland in the Chew Valley. The challenge is to find a practical local way to address the unfolding climate and ecological emergencies we face. An increasing number of Councils and Parish Councils are declaring a climate-emergency but what can they actually do? One course of action is to increase tree cover to absorb carbon and provide habitat for wildlife, but by how much, where and what kind of woodland? Doubling woodland cover is a target but how does that translate in a practical sense to trees on the ground? Why double tree cover? Who is going to do it? On whose land and how is it going to be paid for? You might want to declare your own personal climate emergency but what difference can anybody make as an individual?
Terra Sulis Research CIC has been working together with Friends of the Earth and a local group called Chew Valley Plants Trees to try to answer some of these questions and to start putting them into practice. It is going to be a long journey and these pages describe some of the preparations and first tentative steps and how you might go about doing something similar elsewhere. It is time to start a big conversation.
The methodology in these pages has also been applied at the national scale and an England Map Viewer is available on the Friends of the Earth website. The publicly available open-data used for the analysis have their limitations and when it comes to the assessment of a specific piece of land for tree planting a local ecological survey is recommended.