The More Trees Now mass tree planting campaign to start in National Tree Week
The Dutch NGO Urgenda (which won the world-first climate case) has become Netherlands’ second largest tree planting organisation within three years and now moves to the UK. With a combination of professional staff and tools plus thousands of volunteers we can save trees that would otherwise die and thus scale up tree planting activities. The project is called More Trees Now and starts this autumn.
The UK’s woodlands are in decline. Climate change, storms, droughts, pests, and single-species and exotic tree-planting schemes have decimated the native biodiversity. As a result, tree planting schemes are booming, yet we hear there are ‘not enough’ trees which halts large–scale efforts. A new campaign aims to remedy that by using another source: the forest itself. In the last week of November, a series of pilots starts that will work with the transplantation method. Native saplings in the forest that grow in areas where they cannot mature are transplanted to places where they will thrive to create new green areas. Originally developed in the Netherlands as a solution for tree shortages and slow-moving tree planting schemes, the method is unlimitedly scalable in all countries where saplings of native trees are abundant, and the autumn and winter is cold enough.
More Trees Now
Every tree creates hundreds of saplings a year. Most of these saplings will not reach adulthood. They either disappear naturally due to competition, or they are removed in routine forest management. They grow in bogs, on a hiking path, or they are thinned to create space for other types of plants and trees. These surplus saplings are a source of diverse, ecological, free and native trees. By transplanting these saplings locally one can restore ecosystems and create more green areas elsewhere. More Trees Now is an initiative based on Meer Bomen Nu, a Dutch initiative which has inspired a mass volunteering movement that has transplanted over 1.4 million saplings in three winters in the most densely populated country in Europe. The aim is to make tree planting accessible and free for all who are concerned about biodiversity loss and deforestation.
Pilots to start this November
This November the inventors of the transplantation method, who’ve applied it successfully throughout the Netherlands, will join local initiatives in Wakelyns, Corby, Hollyhead and Carrifran in rolling out the first transplantation pilots in the UK. Part of the program includes events where anyone can join in transplanting native trees from areas where they cannot mature to areas where they can. There will also be lectures on the IT system that the organisation has built. They have created an online tool which allows for a decentralized organisation where anyone can organize events and register and track saplings from their old to their new destination. The system will be freely available throughout the UK with these pilots.
