Trees For Life
Our Ethos
“We have been planting trees for many years and provide an opportunity for our customers to pay just £4 to have a tree planted in one of our many planting schemes. We are keen to accelerate these projects and with the ever increasing need to plant more trees in the UK we hope you can help. It’s time for us all to do our bit”
Nic Snell Managing Director.
What is the importance of trees?
Trees & Woodlands are incredibly important and we need more to be planted. Great Britain is actually behind the rest of Europe in terms of the land area planted with trees. But why are they so important?
Trees & Air Quality
- They help keep our air clean by releasing oxygen storing carbon via CO2 absorption.
- Provide beautiful landscapes, both rural and urban
- Improve community life
- Improve the environmental balance with a greater range of flora and fauna
- Provide a sustainable source of fuel
- They help provide a natural form of flood management & actually help to improve our water quality.
- Planting woodland shelterbelts around your farm lowers windspeed and can reduce spray drift up to 90%, as well as helping to capture pesticide run-off and ammonia released from livestock units
Benefits on Mental Health
Spending time in woodlands and the outdoors have been proven to help improve peoples physical and mental well being Forests can even help to lower blood pressure, pulse rate, and also reduce stress levels. If everyone in England had access to good quality green spaces this could save the NHS £2.1 billion every year. Providing public access to your woodland offers people near you somewhere to come together. Woodland along rivers and streams provides shade to keep rivers cool for fish and other aquatic life, and even leaves, twigs and branches that fall into rivers and streams are also beneficial for plants, invertebrates, and fish.
Woodlands & supporting biodiversity
Woodlands are home to a tremendous amount of wildlife, including endangered species like red squirrels & Goldcrests. They also help create a habitats for a rich array of plant and fungi species. Making smaller woodlands bigger or connecting existing woodlands with one another can help connect habitats and encourage wildlife corridors, boosting nature recovery and enabling species to adapt to an ever-changing climate.
Improve soil quality & reduce flooding risks
By creating woodland in the right places you can slow the flow of water and reduce flood peaks by up to 65% and it can help to prevent run off from your land helping reduce water pollution levels. Upland woodland can increase water storage by intercepting, using and recycling more rainwater than grassland, and woodland on a river’s floodplain can slow the flow of floodwater – helping reducing flooding risks for communities. You can also reduce erosion levels by planting trees along river banks to help stabilize them and prevent landslips. It can also help to improve soil quality as planting woodland between the field edge and a river can reduce sediment run-off by 90-100%, nutrient losses by 20-80%, and reduce pesticide loss in run-off by 60-100%. It can also provide shelter for animals and livestock as well as being an alternative source of food for pollinators.
If 10,00 hectares of woodland are planted every year, the new trees will lock away a massive 50 million tonnes of carbon by 2050.
The Climate Change Act 2008 requires the government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 34% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. We need to reduce CO2 emissions, reduce our fuel usage and switch to renewable energy. Planting trees has the ability to help in every way. The average home produces nine tonnes of CO2 every year.
A single tree will, on average, absorb a tonne of CO2 during its lifetime.
You could be part of this great tree planting revival, every tree counts. Imagine if you , and everyone else in the UK, planted just one tree per annum. That would be over 60 million extra trees a year.
How can you help?
At Certainly Wood we are passionate about creating new woodland within the UK and we have been involved in tree planting for many years. You can find out more about our Plant A Tree visit our product page HERE.