Office for Environmental Protection report: comment

"As the impacts of climate change are being increasingly felt - in our wallets, on our health and in our homes - the notion that protecting and restoring nature is a blocker to growth is simply false. Nature has a vital role to play in going for growth. Healthy environments help to produce the food we eat, improve our health and wellbeing, and can help guard against the worst of climate impacts like increased flooding, all of which boost productivity. 

"But the time to act is now to reap these benefits. Over 70% of the carbon removal from tree planting comes from trees planted in the next five years [2]. In many ways, this is the tree planting parliament. Delay now means missing our climate and nature targets, delaying the resilience benefits that nature can provide. 

"Nature restoration should have the same urgency as housing and infrastructure — healthy ecosystems aren't a blocker to growth, they're the foundation of it."

New analysis from ECIU, published today, finds that over 70% of the woodland needed to meet climate targets in the UK needs to be created by 2030, due to the lag between woodland creation and significant sequestration. [2] Delay to woodland and other habitat creation also pushes back the benefits for a range of other objectives, such as nature recovery and flood risk management.