Trees Planted by Councils Die After “Rush Job to Show Off Green Credentials”
Local authorities have spent more than £11 million of ratepayers’ money on planting trees since 2015, but with little or now aftercare they often fail to survive. The Telegraph has more.
At least 80 local authorities are failing to record whether trees planted to help climate change are surviving, despite them spending more than £11 million in council and central Government funds.
Others report survival rates well below expected, with some projects leaving no trees alive amid concern that planting schemes are being undertaken without adequate expertise.
Experts say a survival rate of 90-95% should be expected if tree-planting schemes are well planned and have adequate aftercare.
The high rates of failure, and lack of monitoring, among local authority schemes raise concerns that money is being wasted on rushed planting projects. Some local authorities said failed trees would be replaced, requiring additional resources and manpower.
The deaths of trees planted for carbon offsetting purposes also raises concerns that councils and businesses may be able to greenwash their pollution, by claiming to have offset their emissions with trees that do not survive.
The Government has pledged more than £9 million to plant hundreds of thousands of trees in communities across England, to help hit its targets of 30,000 hectares of new woodland annually across the UK by 2025.
But Andy Egan, the head of conservation policy for the Woodland Trust, which provides grant funding for council tree planting schemes, said local authorities often lacked the resources to look after newly planted trees.
“Too many local authorities lack the additional resources and capacity needed to look after newly planted trees and to help them survive conditions like the drought we had this summer,” he said. “Equally poor planning practice is putting many much-loved mature trees at risk.”
“The Woodland Trust is calling on Government to use its Environmental Improvement Plan to ensure the long-term investment that’s needed to protect and care for our urban trees is in place.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Another Telegraph investigation into green virtue-signalling reveals that products in Amazon’s eco-friendly range are made up to 5,000 miles away and packaged in single-use plastic.
Stop Press 2: More energy firms are on the brink of collapse, according to the Times, with Outfox the Market likely to be the next to fall.
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Planting trees is not the only thing local councils lack in expertise, it is just one of many.
They are however expert at pissing away our money, and at higher levels, awarding themselves huge salaries and consequent huge pensions. Council tax in many places now sees one third or more going towards these pensions. Often paid for by people who cannot afford to save for a pension of their own.
Troughing at the public purse, in other words. There one hell of a lot of it about these days.
Quite right. It is almost as if there is a competition to see who can loose/ waste the most money, which includes paying very high wages to people with very high opinions of themselves who have little capability. Sorry I digress. are we talking councils or the public sector in general?
They’ve just done an online survey of the public in my local council (Carmarthenshire) asking what people want, how much council tax should increase or to be cut to cover certain items, but going through the survey it’s all about cuts to front line services and personnel. Nothing at all about back office or reducing the number of staff in those offices or making them work more productively.
On one page though they made a mistake of asking for free form views so I suggested the above, although I expect I’ll get ignored.
History repeating itself .I remember in the mid eighties that there was a plan to create a new forested area in and around Bedford .Well last time I drove there all I could see were the same fields .Like all these things its simply a case being seen to be doing something, a positive headline then no consequence as to the outcomes as they chases the next “big thing “.Local authorities are expensive and useless .
…plant a tree in 73, plant some more in 74, watch them thrive in 75 all fertilised with bullshit
I live I Saddleworth. In the last two years the local council has chopped down over 10,000 trees. The wood from the biggest decimation was allegedly diseased but went to sawmills anyway and was destined for the building industry.
The local council has also succeeded at a blatantly corrupt Judicial Review in winning permission to grant building rights to a national developer on a large area of farmland which was covered under OPOL – Other Protected Open Land. 273 houses. The land had also been confirmed as Ancient Woodland which should have provided inviolable protection. It didn’t.
Councils planting trees? They couldn’t plant a foot straight.
I’m truly surprised anyone thinks this is odd…..nothing these people do in relation to anything ‘green’ has any reality or meaning other than as a show…..and possibly to make money somewhere down the line…I’m sure they could claim some Government or European funds for it….
Agree entirely.
The end game is the demonstration of virtue. Whether planting a tree, buying a Tesla, of taking the knee, it is all about the gesture.
Never do these hypocrites put anything on the line, and nothing they do helps anything other than salving their empty souls.
No-one has yet explained to me how we are to unilaterally ‘save the world’ when Russia, China and India appear not to give a toss. What do they know that we don’t, I wonder…
These ppl hate the natural world. They wouldn’t carpet the countryside in either wind turbines or fields of solar panels if they had any regard for the natural world. They have as much regard for the environment as Stalin did for the working classes in Russia.
Spot on.
The only interests councillors have in the environment is how many brown envelopes it can provide.
Or as one ex council leader put it as we stalled the development referred to above / below – “it has to go through. That’s my pension.”
Absolutely! How does CBDC data storage & humungous energy use square with Net Zero & reducing electricity use? A total oxymoron
I once had a teacher in the 70s called Mr Bentley. He worked in engineering for 30 years before he became a teacher.
Speaks volumes compared to this tosh we have to put up with now!
Councils wasting money! What’s new?
The national forest scheme, how did that go?
Hi Dinger , thats what I was remembering but forgot what it was called.Yes by now we would have bears living in them ,if only it had happened lol
I wonder how much “carbon offset” credit can be earned by planting trees that die, then promptly replacing them with more trees that die for even more “carbon offset” credit.
Similar problem when more earnest efforts are made to restore tropical and subtropical woodland:
https://scitechdaily.com/new-study-half-of-replanted-tropical-trees-dont-survive/
It reminds me of the time I saw a couple of people from the local council working by the side of a newly constructed relief road. One person would dig a hole, then the second person would fill it in. They did this repeatedly every metre or so for hours on end. I stopped and asked them what the purpose of this activity was, and the reply was that they were doing the job they’d been told to do, it was wasn’t their fault that the person who put the tree in hole had phoned sick that morning.
Boom, boom..! 🙂
Several times this summer I tottered down the street with a bucket of washing up water to feed the wilted saplings that the Council had put in. Result, they have survived. I truly thought there would be more of you in the comments who had done the same. I didn’t expect the council to be suddenly competent. This whole website is meant to be full of people calling for small government and moaning that people don’t do things for themselves.
I think the headline photo says it all. Unless it’s one of those ‘no idea of the scale’ pictures then those trees are way too close together, unless they’re something fast growing that will be harvested quickly like pine or willow.