Well done, Nigel!
James Melville @JamesMelville
Imagine a beautiful, cheap and effective carbon capture machine that can work for generations to capture solar energy and convert water, carbon dioxide and minerals into oxygen and store energy-rich organic compounds while also reducing surrounding temperatures and pollution? Across mainland Europe, nature is making a dramatic recovery. Wildlife is returning, forests are expanding, rivers are being set free and wetlands restored. As nature bounces back, people are returning too, finding new economic opportunities and enjoying the many benefits of a revitalised landscape.
So, if rewilding can happen in Italy, Germany, Poland and Norway, could Scotland be next? Scotland is bidding to become the world’s first ‘rewilding nation’, led by a coalition of more than 20 organisations under the Scottish Rewilding Alliance.
A pathway to Scotland as a ‘rewilding nation’ was presented to government ministers at a reception last week, which was described as a ‘trailblazing vision of hope’ by the Scottish national paper, The Herald. The Rewilding Nation Charter calls on the Scottish government to commit to 30 per cent “nature recovery” of the nation’s land and seas. Polls suggest that 80 per cent of Scots believe the government should have policies in place to support rewilding. “There is consistent and huge support for nature restoration across rural communities,” says Steve Micklewright, Trees for Life's chief executive and co-convenor of the Scottish Rewilding Alliance. “And importantly, for rural communities - and across different sectors, including those involving traditional rural jobs - nature restoration creates job opportunities alongside its other social and economic benefits,” Micklewright adds. “Reducing deer numbers to allow woodlands to regenerate requires more people with deer-stalking skills, for example, while restoring peatlands creates a whole new workforce.” Through public donations alone, the alliance successfully secured its ambitious £200,000 fundraising goal in just six days earlier this year, with all donations up to £100,000 matched under the UK’s Big Give Green Match Fund. Scotland’s rewilding pathway is comprehensive and “includes action to empower and engage communities,” says Kevin Cumming, deputy convenor of the Scottish Rewilding Alliance and rewilding director at Rewilding Britain. There are also “proposals around co-existing with wildlife, restoring our land with essential support for land managers and farmers, restoring our seas and nature-based economies and jobs,” Cumming says. Three years ago, Northwoods partner Denmarkfield, began rewilding 90 acres of intensively farmed barley fields north of Perth. In the space of just a few years, new grassland habitat has helped bumblebee numbers surge from just 35 individuals to 4,056 in the same fields.
We are a charity working to make rewilding happen across Scotland, as a solution to the growing climate and biodiversity crises.
Our vision is of a vast network of rewilded land and water across Scotland, where wildlife flourishes and people thrive. To achieve this, we work across two focus areas: - driving support for rewilding - committing more land and water to rewilding It is the mother tree of one of the most popular cooking apples in the world.
The original 220-year-old bramley apple tree is still fruiting in the garden of a cottage in Southwell, the Nottinghamshire village that on Saturday hosts an annual festival celebrating the bramley apple. The cottages that come with the garden, which were purchased by Nottingham Trent University in 2018, are used as student accommodation and there is no public access to enjoy the tree. The artist Dan Llywelyn Hall has painted the tree. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions. But as the Earth heats up, scientists are increasingly concerned that those crucial processes are breaking down. In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.
There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor. “We’re seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems. We’re seeing massive cracks on land – terrestrial ecosystems are losing their carbon store and carbon uptake capacity, but the oceans are also showing signs of instability,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told an event at New York Climate Week in September. “Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end,” he said. The 2023 breakdown of the land carbon sink could be temporary: without the pressures of drought or wildfires, land would return to absorbing carbon again. But it demonstrates the fragility of these ecosystems, with massive implications for the climate crisis. Reaching net zero is impossible without nature. In the absence of technology that can remove atmospheric carbon on a large scale, the Earth’s vast forests, grasslands, peat bogs and oceans are the only option for absorbing human carbon pollution, which reached a record 37.4bn tonnes in 2023. At least 118 countries are relying on the land to meet national climate targets. But rising temperatures, increased extreme weather and droughts are pushing the ecosystems into uncharted territory. The kind of rapid land sink collapse seen in 2023 has not been factored into most climate models. If it continues, it raises the prospect of rapid global heating beyond what those models have predicted. What happens to the world if forests stop absorbing carbon? Ask Finland.
Natural sinks of forests and peat were key to Finland’s ambitious target to be carbon neutral by 2035. But now, the land has started emitting more greenhouse gases than it stores. The boreal forests in the Sami homeland take so long to grow that even small, stunted trees are often hundreds of years old. It is part of the Taiga – meaning “land of the little sticks” in Russian – that stretches around the far northern hemisphere through Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada. Tiina Sanila-Aikio says many old Sami reindeer herders have never before experienced this year’s hot weather in the Lapland region of Finland. It is these forests that helped underpin the credibility of the most ambitious carbon-neutrality target in the developed world: Finland’s commitment to be carbon neutral by 2035. The law, which came into force two years ago, means the country is aiming to reach the target 15 years earlier than many of its EU counterparts. The narrative was that Finland’s forests are a huge carbon sink that offsets emissions. This has changed very, very dramatically. In a country of 5.6 million people with nearly 70% covered by forests and peatlands, many assumed the plan would not be a problem. For decades, the country’s forests and peatlands had reliably removed more carbon from the atmosphere than they released. But from about 2010, the amount the land absorbed started to decline, slowly at first, then rapidly. By 2018, Finland’s land sink – the phrase scientists use to describe something that absorbs more carbon than it releases – had vanished. Its forest sink has declined about 90% from 2009 to 2022, with the rest of the decline fuelled by increased emissions from soil and peat. In 2021-22, Finland’s land sector was a net contributor to global heating. The impact on Finland’s overall climate progress is dramatic: despite cutting emissions by 43% across all other sectors, its net emissions are at about the same level as the early 1990s. It is as if nothing has happened for 30 years. There are two times of year I particularly love being among trees. The first is at the height of spring, when new leaves and woodland plants are at their most intensely green. The second is the point in autumn when the summer hues shift overnight and the woods take on a whole new coat. In Japanese there is a wonderful term for both, mikkaminumanosakura, meaning a moment of sudden, dramatic change. As we move deeper into autumn, we’re heading for one of these moments, and I’ll be out in the woods trying to catch it.
In Scotland, where access rights mean one can roam on nearly all land and inland water, my hike took me from the towering conifers and rushing burns of Reelig Glen, through farmland and private woods to one of Scotland’s first community-owned woodlands, Abriachan Forest Trust. It covers 163 hectares, so it’s easy to find your own slice of wilderness, and it is worth visiting for the variety of woodland birds alone. Set in a hanging valley a stone’s throw from Loch Ness, and with miles of bike trails and paths, community events and a forest school, Abriachan is a model of what a community can do when it makes a woodland work for everyone, from children to pine martens.
This colossal multi-stemmed tree is a hybrid of the UK's two native oaks, pedunculate and sessile. Its interesting name is probably a corruption of the Scots word ‘meikle’, meaning big, though some believe it was named after The Michael, the largest sailing ship afloat in the 16th century. The centuries-old oak woodland of Dalkeith Country Park is an unusual habitat in Scotland and one of the country's three veteran oak hotspots. The many oaks here are thought to be descendants of The Michael. Vote for The Michael.
The Capon Oak is one of the last surviving trees of the ancient Jedforest. Its distorted form may have saved it from felling since its wood would have been useless for shipbuilding. Thought to have been a trysting or gathering point in the 16th century, local men are said to have met beneath its branches before skirmishes or to resolve disputes. For 75 years it has been part of the annual Jethart Callant's Festival, with a sprig from the tree being used to decorate the leading man, or Callant. Vote for the Capon Oak. Prescribing activities in nature to tackle mental ill health has benefited thousands of people across England.
More than 8,000 people were helped to take part in activities including nature walks, community gardening, tree planting and wild swimming. It is thought to be the largest such project in the world so far. The results showed that after taking part in the schemes, people’s feelings of happiness and of life being worthwhile jumped to near national averages, while levels of anxiety fell significantly. The project also found the cost of a green prescription was about £500, making it cost-effective compared with other treatments. Cognitive behavioural therapy costs about £1,000 for 10 sessions. An ambitious plan to plant at least a million native trees on crofts in the Outer Hebrides has taken root, with more than 200 small new woods sprouting across the islands.
The Western Isles woodland project hopes to reestablish a thriving mosaic of small woods dotted across the islands by using vacant or underused crofts to reforest the Hebrides and promote nature restoration. Under the project, funded mainly by profits from the UK’s largest community-owned windfarm, west of Stornoway, 211,000 trees have already been planted on 245 crofts, plots of land that were historically family-run small holdings. Some of the new woodlands have up to 1,500 trees grown from local seeds, featuring alder, hazel, birch, rowan, Scots pine, blackthorn, sycamore and various species of willow. The project has been so successful it has helped establish three new tree nurseries on the islands. ICU Steps is a support group for patients and family who have survived Intensive Care in hospital, and are expanding across Scotland. Bob Glen is doing the Kiltwalk in Edinburgh on September 15 to raise funds for them. Any donation, no matter how small can make a huge difference. Here’s a link and a QR code for my JustGiving page. Thank you! https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/george-guy
Trees, those silent, stationary beings we often take for granted are actually on the move.
Entire species of trees in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest are shifting their habitats in response to the ever-looming specter of climate change. We're all familiar with migration: Wildebeests gallop across Africa, Monarch butterflies flit across the Americas ... but did you know that forests migrate, too?
In his new book The Journeys of Trees, science writer Zach St. George explores an agonizingly slow migration, as forests creep inch by inch to more hospitable places. Individual trees, he writes, are rooted in one spot. But forests? Forests "are restless things." As old trees die and new ones sprouts up, the forest is — ever so slightly — moving. Small-scale, low-impact market gardening is a Cinderella industry that lacks significant government support and yet it is remarkably productive: as Monbiot reveals in his book Regenesis, the market gardener Iain Tolhurst produces 120 tonnes of fruit and veg each year on just 7 hectares. In Norfolk, the 0.4-hectare (1 acre) community market garden Eve’s Hill Veg Co has a turnover of £96,000, supplies vegetables to eight shops and restaurants and about 50 local families, employs three paid trainees and helps put more than 40 people through their Level 1 horticultural course each year. And their vegetables taste delicious.
We take a bike ride through a glacial trough that slowly but surely has become a wildlife haven
The countryside is often portrayed as a green and pleasant land - a rural idyll. But under the surface, rural culture wars rage: the Right to Roam, veganism, birds of prey, rewilding, the urban/rural divide - and trees.
Anna Jones is a farmer’s daughter who has worked as a rural affairs journalist for almost 20 years. In this series she uncovers the personal stories of individuals caught up in these battle grounds. On the face of it, there’s nothing that offensive about a tree. But in this episode Anna explores how for some, they’re beginning to represent a threat to their identity, their sense of control…and even their community. For Anthony Geddes, the growing hostility towards trees has contributed to him leaving his job in forestry: “You feel like you're in this sort of this embattled environment where it's really difficult to be the person who's talking about trees." Palaeoclimatology finds that in the timespan in which humans evolved and formed organised societies, today’s global climate – a bit more than 1C hotter on average than it was in the preindustrial period before people started burning huge quantities of fossil fuels – is unparalleled. It has not been as hot as this for at least 125,000 years, prior to the last ice age, and most likely longer, potentially going back at least 1 million years.
“Humans have not faced a climate like this over our long history; we are starting to hit temperatures that are unprecedented. It’s not like we will all become extinct, but we are messing with a thermostat that is pushing [us] outside a window we have been in during all of human civilisation.” Hot weather inflamed by carbon pollution killed nearly 50,000 people in Europe last year, with the continent warming at a much faster rate than other parts of the world.
Heatwaves have grown hotter, longer and more common as people have burned fossil fuels and destroyed nature – clogging the atmosphere with gases that act like a greenhouse and heat the planet. Globally, 2023 was the hottest year on record, and scientists expect 2024 to soon take its place.Europe is warming at much faster rate than other parts of world, leading to fires, drought and health problems. Woodland cover in 2018 Low risk area for woodland creation in Scotland The UK has just three decades to reach net-zero emissions and tree planting has emerged as a prominent part of the government’s plan to get there.
With technological solutions in their infancy, trees are for now the only scalable “negative emissions” strategy and can come with additional benefits for wildlife, flood management and health. Moreover, there is strong public support for tree planting to tackle climate change. 83% of UK forests are managed for production purposes, but at least half of UK-grown wood is used in short-term applications, such as panelling, fencing and pulp, and further quarter burned for energy (80% of the UK’s wood is imported). The conifers preferred by timber producers are faster growing and, therefore, absorb a lot of carbon quickly. This is exemplified by Sitka spruce, a non-native species that makes up more than half of the UK’s commercial conifer plantations. If you want carbon in the next 30 years and you are starting from scratch, there’s no contest. Sitka has been bred to convert atmospheric carbon into wood. But extensive research has demonstrated that diverse forests are actually better at sequestering carbon, as well as providing more biodiverse habitats and greater resilience to diseases, pests and climate change. But the apparent simplicity of planting trees to “suck” carbon from the atmosphere masks a highly complex issue. Forests are not a “silver bullet” for cutting CO2 emissions and previous drives to ramp up UK afforestation have not always gone smoothly. The evidence is clear that even if tree planting meets its highest potential for carbon storage, it would only offset a small fraction of the UK’s current and future emissions. Most of the effort to reach net-zero emissions must come from reducing fossil fuel use, rather than simply relying on trees to offset emissions. The whole focus on tree planting is being used by some to distract and delay from the primary objective to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Global warming is happening at a faster rate than ever. Our polar ice caps are melting and our forests are burning.
We’re in a climate emergency and it’s threatening our planet. According to experts, we're on track for an increase of between 3°C and 4°C by 2100. And these are only global average temperatures. At the poles and over land (where people live), the increase may be higher – possibly even double. Restoring and protecting the world’s forests is crucial if humanity is to stop the worst effects of climate breakdown and halt the extinction of rare species.
Researchers have been concerned, however, that actions to capture carbon, restore biodiversity and find ways to support the livelihoods of the people who live near and in the forests might be at odds. This is a particular issue in many parts of the globe that have important forests, as the people living nearby often have precarious livelihoods that can be negatively affected if the land they use to survive is encroached on. Now a new work has found that, with careful thought, all three important outcomes can be delivered by setting up “integrated” plans, where all three goals are combined, delivering more than 80% of the benefits in all three areas at once and that socioeconomically disadvantaged groups would benefit disproportionately from this approach. |
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