Forest Futures: Letting Nature Innovate

As the IPCC has argued, however, “CDR deployed at scale is unproven,” and overreliance on CDR technology presents a “major risk in the ability to limit warming to 1.5°C.” In this context, it is crucial to note that technological innovation is not the only—or even the best—means of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Climate scientists, ecologists and environmentalists have been arguing for years that the climate catastrophe is intimately tied up with the worldwide breakdown of ecosystems and that the most reliable means of slowing down global warming is to restore biodiverse ecosystems at scale. A 2019 report published in Nature, for example, argued that the restoration of biodiverse natural forests is the “most effective approach for storing carbon” and is even more reliable and sustainable as a means of carbon capture than monoculture plantations—plantations consisting of one species of tree, generally grown for commercial purposes.

Reforestation is a key issue for the UK, only 13% of which is covered by woodland according to the Woodland Trust. This is compared to around 39% for the EU. While the comparison may seem unfair since the EU figure includes countries like Sweden and Finland (with 63% and 66% forest coverage, respectively), the Woodland Trust also points out that only half of Britain’s trees are native species. The other half are “non-native, commercial conifer plantations.” The knock-on effect for carbon capture potential is serious. Ancient woodlands, which are relatively biodiverse, hold 36% of carbon captured in British trees despite making up just 25% of all woodland.

To be fair, the government nods to the importance of ecosystem restoration in its Ten Point Plan: under the heading, “Protecting our Natural Environment,” they promise to “safeguard our cherished landscapes” and “restore habitats for wildlife in order to combat biodiversity loss and adapt to climate change.” New National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) are promised, along with new “long-term landscape recovery projects.” To what extent then will the UK’s green recovery involve reforestation (and the consequent benefits of natural carbon capture)?

It used to be the case that the debate around the plight of British trees focused on the impact of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which at one time, subsidized the removal of closed-canopy woodland on the grounds that such clearances would render land usable for agricultural purposes. In 2011, the Woodland Trust submitted evidence to a parliamentary inquiry that the CAP actually worked against their goal of nurturing closed canopy woodland in Britain. In 2016, during the lead up to the UK’s referendum on EU membership, environmental writer George Monbiot argued that we should refer to these funds as “land subsidies” since “you don’t have to produce any food to receive them. Your land just has to look agricultural, which means bare.” In the intervening period, of course, the environmental policy landscape has evolved dramatically in Europe and across the world. The new CAP for 2023-2027 has been redesigned under the rubric of the European Green Deal, so that 40% of the CAP budget for that period will go towards biodiversity- and climate-related initiatives.

Following the UK’s departure from the EU, the CAP was replaced with a range of funding frameworks, including the Sustainable Farming Incentive, the Local Nature Recovery Programme, and the Landscape Recovery Scheme. The last of these was launched this year, and the government hopes it will facilitate the kind of large-scale ecosystem and habitat restoration we saw promised in the Ten Point Plan. The first round is open (until 24 May 2022) to individuals or groups responsible for 500-5000 hectares of land of any type. A policy paper on the scheme published earlier in the year reiterated the government’s commitment to restore “our most precious and beautiful landscapes,” and the first round alone is expected to create at least “10,000 hectares of restored habitat” and improve the conservation status of “45- 57% of Species of Principal Importance.”

The Landscape Recovery Scheme offers a crucial glimpse of the kind of biodiversity-oriented restoration programmes that will be essential in the near future in the battle against climate crisis and ecosystem collapse: the scheme could, theoretically, contribute to a large-scale transition away from commercial plantations in the UK and towards biodiverse native forests. However, there is tension here in the government’s own presentation of environmental restoration. If the purpose of the scheme is to protect “cherished” and “precious” landscapes, what do we do with the fact that these landscapes will be radically altered by extensive reforestation? As Monbiot has argued in a different context, British nature-lovers frequently claim to love and cherish those landscapes brought into being, in part, by deforestation—the open hills of the Cambrian mountains in Wales and the Lake District in the North-West of England or the heath and moorland of parts of Yorkshire and the Scottish Highlands.*

In fact, in a weird affective irony, the restoration of lost biodiversity may very well feel in its novelty less like a return to a cherished landscape, and more like the contemplation of those radical technological innovations that the government is so keen to champion through the NZIP. The fact is that reforesting and restoring natural habitats, if done properly, will completely transform our rural landscapes, uplands, and coasts, filling them with myriad (in some cases unfamiliar) species of plant-life, as well as endangered and even formerly extinct animals. Our very understanding of natural beauty will no doubt change too: the patchwork of fields and open land unobscured by thick forest — which, since at least the late eighteenth century, has dominated British expectations for natural beauty† — may very well have to give way to an aesthetic of biodiversity and to a view of the land as dynamic and mutable. The placid English idyll (in which, as the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson famously put it, the fields “appear to have been finished with a pencil instead of a plough”) may not—and perhaps should not—survive the restoration of biodiverse ecosystems.

This green recovery will result, I would suggest, in new thrilling experiences of nature, as well as crucial benefits for the climate and environment, but it will be a shock too. The government’s
long-awaited Levelling Up White Paper, published this February promised £15 million for the Northern Forest Initiative, framing the commitment as part of the government’s efforts at “restoring local pride.” The Northern Forest combines multiple woodland planting projects across the North of England from Liverpool to Hull, encompassing an area of over 10,000 square miles; the goal is to plant over 50 million trees (capable of absorbing 7.5 million tonnes of CO2 by 2050). How local communities, as well as hikers and ramblers, will actually experience the transition from the stark openness of the North York Moors, for example, to the vibrant wilderness of a restored forest is unclear.

In my view, the government would do well to explicitly celebrate this kind of project not as a means of protecting well-loved rural vistas but as a means of transforming the land in order to combat the existential threat of climate breakdown. In this way, the Landscape Recovery Scheme or the Northern Forest initiative will, counter-intuitively, come to resemble the radical technological innovations supported by the likes of NZIP and the Hydrogen BECCS programme. Highlighting such a resemblance and admitting how radical some of these changes to the landscape could be might actually help to marshal local support.

Finally, the consequences of this for green grant-seekers, looking to leverage government funds for environmental projects, are varied. One practical reality is that the language of conservation might soon become not merely unfashionable but laughable. It now behooves environmental project managers and grant writers to cast their proposals in terms of radical, innovative— and even unpredictable—environmental transformation. Framing an ecological restoration project straightforwardly in terms of “innovation” might have once seemed bizarre. Yet, the current climate crisis and the belated emergence of a political will to fund a major green agenda together demand this new vision.

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