Sometimes the things that are most familiar to us are also the easiest to take for granted.
Trees are so deeply woven into our landscapes, our communities and our lives that it is easy to overlook just how extraordinary they are – and just how much they do for us.
This week, the Government announced £79 million of new funding to help local communities restore nature and adapt to a changing climate. At the heart of that announcement is a £53 million Community Trees Fund, intended to support the planting of up to 500,000 new trees in England between 2027 and 2030.
It is welcome recognition of something humanity has understood for generations: trees matter.
They matter for our climate. As they grow, trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store carbon in their trunks, branches, roots and surrounding soils. Planting more trees, protecting existing woodland and managing it well can therefore make an important contribution to addressing climate change.
They matter when our climate changes too. The Government points out that trees planted in our towns and cities can reduce air temperatures by as much as 4°C, providing shade and natural cooling during increasingly hot summers. A mature tree can intercept more than 15,000 litres of rainwater each year, while woodland planted and managed in the right places can help slow the flow of water through the landscape and reduce the risk of flooding.
Trees are habitats. From their roots to their highest branches, they provide food, shelter and breeding spaces for an extraordinary variety of birds, mammals, insects, fungi and plants. Woodlands connect habitats and create corridors through which wildlife can move.
They improve the places in which we live. They soften our towns and cities, provide spaces for recreation and have recognised benefits for our physical and mental wellbeing.
And trees provide us with one of humanity’s oldest and most versatile natural materials: wood.
We build with it. We make furniture from it. We craft with it. We turn it into paper, flooring, fencing and countless other products. Properly sourced, it is a renewable material that can continue storing carbon long after the tree itself has been harvested.
And, of course, for thousands of years we have also used wood to keep ourselves warm.
That last use can sometimes become detached from the wider story of trees and woodland. But it shouldn’t.
A living, renewable resource
A tree is not a fossil resource. Managed responsibly, woodland is a living and renewable one.
Good woodland management is not simply about planting trees and leaving them untouched forever. Woodlands are dynamic environments. Trees grow, mature and compete for light and space. They need to be managed for resilience, biodiversity and, in many cases, productive use.
Thinning, coppicing, pruning and other woodland management activities all produce wood. So too do forestry operations and the processing of timber for higher-value uses.
Not every piece of wood harvested from a sustainably managed woodland will become a beam, a floorboard or a beautiful piece of furniture. Smaller stems, branchwood, thinnings and residues have value too. One of those uses is as fuel.
That matters because productive woodland has an economic value as well as an environmental one. Government itself recognises timber and wood fuel among the income opportunities that can come from well-managed woodland.
Creating markets for responsibly sourced wood can therefore form part of the economics that enable woodland owners to manage, maintain and regenerate their woods for the future.
The principle should be straightforward: use this precious natural resource intelligently, responsibly and efficiently.
From woodland to warmth
For households that choose to heat with wood, that same natural resource can provide something very immediate: warmth.
Used in a modern, Ecodesign stove and burned correctly, good-quality dry wood can provide highly effective secondary heating for the home. It can allow a household to heat the room in which people are spending their time rather than necessarily relying solely on whole-house heating.
It can also provide resilience. A wood-burning stove does not depend on the electricity grid to produce heat and can continue to provide warmth during a power cut – an increasingly relevant consideration as we think about the resilience of our homes and communities.
None of this means that how we burn wood does not matter. It does.
The transition away from open fires and older, inefficient appliances towards modern stoves matters. Using appropriately seasoned wood with a moisture content of 20% or less matters. Operating a stove correctly, maintaining it properly and having the chimney swept regularly all matter.
Responsible use must sit alongside responsible sourcing.
But recognising the importance of best practice should not prevent us from recognising something equally important: wood is a renewable natural resource with many valuable uses, and providing heat is one of them.
Plant. Grow. Manage. Use. Regenerate.
Perhaps the Government’s announcement gives us an opportunity to think differently about the humble tree.
Not simply as something to plant because a target says we should. Not simply as a carbon store, a habitat, a source of shade or a defence against flooding. And not simply as a source of timber or fuel.
A tree can be all of those things.
The real opportunity lies in understanding the whole cycle.
We plant trees.
We allow them to grow and create habitats, capture carbon, hold water, cool our communities and enrich our landscapes.
We manage our woodlands so that they remain healthy, diverse, productive and resilient.
We use the remarkable renewable material they provide – prioritising timber and other long-lived uses where appropriate and finding productive uses for the smaller material and residues that remain.
And we plant, regenerate and manage again for the generations that follow.
There is something beautifully simple about that cycle.
At a time when we are searching for increasingly complicated solutions to some of society’s biggest challenges, perhaps we should also remember the extraordinary resource that has been growing quietly around us all along.
A source of beauty. A home for nature. A defence against a changing climate. A building material. A livelihood. A renewable resource.
And, when winter comes, a source of warmth.
