Tree-mendous grants of almost £300,000 will boost planting across Lancashire
Lancashire County Council's Treescapes team have secured three separate grants which will help woodlands to flourish across Lancashire, Blackburn with Darwen, and Blackpool.
On Friday, November 24, it was announced that they were successful on a £150,000 bid from the Coronation Living Heritage Fund, which was created to mark the Coronation of the King.
This will support the planting of several urban community micro-woods (called Miyawaki woods) and to support community groups planting orchards across Lancashire, Blackburn with Darwen, and Blackpool.
This latest funding adds to the bids already secured of £83,692 from the Local Authority Treescapes Fund and the £61,237 from the Urban Tree Challenge Fund.
The Local Authority Treescapes Fund will pay for the replacement of 97 trees, which were felled alongside highways due to a disease called ash dieback, and 500 small saplings along the A59 near Clitheroe. Planting in this area is vital as it was ground zero for the North West, where the deadly disease was first discovered in 2014.
The Urban Tree Challenge Fund will plant larger trees in urban greenspaces in Lancashire and Blackburn, with Darwen with Tarleton Community Primary school to receive 20 woodland and fruit trees.
County Councillor Shaun Turner, cabinet member for Environment and Climate Change said: "There are endless benefits to planting more trees across Lancashire and these three grants are a very positive step forward for the environment.
"We may only be left with a small portion on the woodland that once dominated the UK, but we must do everything that we can to take care of it and rebuild it when there has been a problem.
"To limit the spread of the Ash dieback disease, we were forced to cut down affected trees. Replanting these is a very positive step forward and as Clitheroe was the first area to be horribly decimated by the disease almost 10 years ago, it feels like we are almost full circle to be starting with the replanting there."
Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki developed a tree planting technique that involves enhancing the soil and planting trees closer together, which results in faster growth than traditional techniques. This faster growth allows carbon to be absorbed faster.
Councillor Turner added: "The Miyawaki woods are also a very exciting new development and will absorb carbon faster than woodlands do usually, as they will grow faster and be so densely populated."
Notes to editors
Notes to Editors:
The Treescapes team has been funded by the DEFRA Woodland Creation Accelerator Fund to work with public, private, and voluntary sector partners across Lancashire, Blackburn with Darwen and Blackpoll to deliver an ambitious programme to plant 170 hectares of rural woodland and 30,000 urban and peri-urban trees by 2025.
Funding has been secured from grants made available by DEFRA and the Forestry.
Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki found a method to plant a fully realized forest in 20 to 30 years, while conventional methods take 200 to 300 years. Miyawaki found that trees naturally grew much faster if planted closer together and with precise and intensive soil preparation, over trees that were planted with more traditional methods. The method has been tested over the years and has shown the resulting forest can be 30 times denser, with plant growth 10 times faster – thereby absorbing carbon faster, and can have 20 times increased biodiversity over a traditional newly planted woodland (Miyawaki 1988, Miyawaki 1999, Ranjan et al 2016, Sivabalan et al 2021).
The Coronation Living Heritage Fund supported by £2.5m in funding has been made available through Defra’s £758m Nature for Climate Fund to allow county, unitary, metropolitan, London borough, district and city local authorities the chance to apply for up to two grants for projects ranging between £10,000 and £50,000. The funding will support the development of micro-woods and community orchards and commemorate the King’s Coronation. Funds can be distributed across projects in their area.
Through the England Trees Action Plan and supported by the £758m Nature for Climate Fund Defra will help to transform the treescape and the forestry sector helping to put the UK on track to meet net zero targets, reverse the decline in nature and support economic growth.