For over 30 years Forest of Mercia have been planting pockets of woodland and hedgerows all across Staffordshire.

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Trees for Climate

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Forest of Mercia CIC are a key partner in a new programme called Trees for Climate, which is being delivered by the partnership of ten Community Forest organisations that span the country, from Yorkshire to Somerset. An initial £12.1m of grant funding for the first planting session in 2020/21 has been secured from the Government’s Nature for Climate fund. This is in a push to help deliver the English portion of the government’s commitment to increase tree planting to 30,000 hectares per year, across the UK, by 2025 alongside peatland restoration and nature recovery.

 

In total, the trees to be planted across winter 2020 and into 2021 will eventually store over 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and will also help in making local landscapes more resilient to the impacts of climate change.

 

Forest of Mercia CIC will deliver a mixture of small-scale planting, some on school grounds and others on larger scale public open space. Native trees and shrubs will be planted with local private and public landowners to capture carbon and to help reduce the effect of climate change. All of the planting will benefit the environment, and will have other positive impacts such as increasing wildlife habitat, increased biodiversity, flood protection and food production. Two sites have also been identified for the planting of orchards for local use and to reduce food miles.

 

As well as funding the tree planting activity itself, the grant will enable each of the Community Forests to manage all aspects of the new woodland creation carefully, including community and landowner engagement as well as developing new approaches to long term woodland management, greater levels of sustainability, and finding innovative new models of woodland delivery that may help to shape the future of community forestry forever.

 

 

Please contact us at info@forestofmercia.com if you have some land that you would like to be considered for tree planting.

 

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Trees for learning

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For DEFRA’s Trees for learning project. Forest of Mercia CIC planted thousands of trees with the help of local primary school children.

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The project was a collaboration with our fellow Community Forests and the Woodland trust to plant 1 Million trees across England by Spring 2020.