Obviously, environmental news is understandably falling through the cracks at the moment and everything is a little overwhelming. You can’t escape what’s going on, online or offline and there isn’t a lot of good news to be had. So we aren’t here to talk about that.

It’s the International Day of Forests on Sat 21st and, despite everything that’s going on, trees are still just as important.

Devastatingly, research shows that the Amazon is losing its ability to absorb carbon and may actually become a source of co2 going into the atmosphere within the next decade. Logging and farming have become such a huge issue that, at a time when we are already struggling with irreversible losses of glaciers and polar ice, it really feels like a lot of hope is lost and we truly might be past the tipping point. This is why it’s more important now than ever that we plant as many trees as we physically can, as a species.

A good target

Our government has pledged to plant 60 million trees over the next 5 years - this is obviously ambitious and now, like many other governments, we may struggle to achieve this. But having such an ambitious target is the important thing - as a nation, forests absorb 10 million tonnes of our CO2 emissions but we need more. A lot more. 354.1 million more tonnes to be exact. Thinking big is the only way to solve the climate emergency, and trees are the best solution.

The UN started the International Day of Forests to celebrate how amazing trees are but since 2012 (when it began) more and more people have become aware of just how important they are - both as habitats, absorbers of emissions, and everything else in-between. We’ve planted over 2 million trees since the early 90s but we are a very small charity, with limited resources - hopefully the government will be able to pull in a lot of help and get more trees in the ground, even if they don’t achieve the target straight away. After all, at the moment they do have other things on their mind.

Our plan

In the meantime, we’ll keep planting every year (you can help us by making a donation). Our next planting site is over next to Kings Wood (near Ampthill) and we planted 100 trees there this season - admittedly several of which were blown over in the storms, but we’ve sorted them out so they’ll be going strong by next winter. We had a fantastic tree-planting season, despite the weather - read more about it here.

So yes - there is a lot of bad news right now but there is still some good stuff happening in the background. And hopefully the good stuff will continue for a lot longer than the bad.