National Highways carried out nearly 40 big projects across England to compensate for mature trees felled by roadworks.
But figures obtained by a freedom of information request revealed that an average of 30.4 per cent of the saplings have died across nine projects, The Times reported.
The government-owned company was only able to provide figures for nine of its 38 big road projects, meaning the number of dead trees is likely higher.
Experts warn Highways England has focused on the number of trees planted, rather than their survival.
At Chowns Mill A45/A6 junction in Northamptonshire, the last of 2,500 saplings were planted under two years ago, and only a quarter are still alive.
In total, at least 405,000 of 945,000 trees planted since 2018 have died.
Tom Clancy from National Highways said: ‘We take our responsibility to the environment seriously and are exploring ways we can enhance the local landscape.’
edReardon ~ “This Greenwashing goes on all the time, trees are planted to offset carbon generation, but it is an absolute con – firstly they take too long to reach maturity to make any difference, and secondly a high proportion of them die-off because of zero maintenance after planting. If you are going to plant trees then there needs to be a five maintenance plan attached to them to ensure they reach the point where they will survive, just putting a plastic tree-guard around them on day one is not sufficient”.
wilfulsprite ~ “There are loads along the A14 around Huntingdon following road redesign, but they planted them in the hot dry summer of 2019….maybe if they had waited until Autumn, they wouldn’t have died from dehydration” .
Connect The Dotz ~ “UK roadside trees are being ruthlessly cut down at an alarming and increasing rate… I drive along 100 miles of road in southern England every week for work, and I estimate that stretch of road alone has lost over 1,000 mature and tall trees on the roadside since 2020… Chainsawed down to a pathetic stump… Multiply that across the country, and it is millions gone since lockdown… It has to stop”.
Mike ~ “What did Hereford Green Council do last year planted trees in big planters and did not water them during the heat wave. Cost to the rate payer £600,000” .
Paul O Sullivan ~ “Further reading on this subject Phantom Forests: Why Ambitious Tree Planting Projects Are Failing”
Phantom Forests: Why Ambitious Tree Planting Projects Are Failing
It was perhaps the most spectacular failed tree planting project ever. Certainly the fastest. On March 8, 2012, teams of village volunteers in Camarines Sur province on the Filipino island of Luzon sunk over a million mangrove seedlings into coastal mud in just an hour of frenzied activity. The governor declared it a resounding success for his continuing efforts to green the province. At a hasty ceremony on dry land, an official adjudicator from Guinness World Records declared that nobody had ever planted so many trees in such a short time and handed the governor a certificate proclaiming the world record. Plenty of headlines followed.
But look today at the coastline where most of the trees were planted. There is no sign of the mangroves that, after a decade of growth, should be close to maturity. An on-the-ground study published in 2020 by British mangrove restoration researcher Dominic Wodehouse, then of Bangor University in Wales, found that fewer than 2 percent of them had survived. The other 98 percent had died or were washed away.
“It was a complete disaster,” agrees Jim Enright, former Asia coordinator of the U.S.-based nonprofit Mangrove Action Project. “But no one that we know of from Guinness or the record-planting proponents have carried out follow-up monitoring.”
In another high-profile case, in November 2019, the Turkish government claimed to have planted more trees on dry land than anyone else in a single hour — 300,000, in the central province of Çorum. It beat a record, also confirmed by Guinness inspectors, set four years before in the Himalayan state of Bhutan. The Çorum planting was part of a National Afforestation Day, when volunteers planted 11 million trees at 2,000 sites across Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was among those wielding a spade.
But two months later, the head of the country’s union of forestry workers reported that a survey by its members had found that as many as 90 percent of the national plantings had died. The government denies this, but experts said its counter-claim that 95 percent of the trees had survived and continued to grow was improbably high. No independent audit has yet been carried out.
Tree planting in the Philippines under its National Greening Program has also been a widespread failure, according to a 2019 study by the government’s own Commission on Audit. Ministers imposed unachievable planting targets, it said, resulting in planting “without … survey, mapping and planning.” The actual increase in forest cover achieved was little more than a tenth of that planned.
The causes of failure vary but include planting single species of trees that become vulnerable to disease; competing demands for the land; changing climate; planting in areas not previously forested; and a lack of aftercare such as watering saplings.
Everybody likes trees. There is no anti-tree lobby. A global push to go beyond conservation of existing forests and start creating new ones goes back to 2011, when many of the world’s governments, including the United States, signed up to the Bonn Challenge, which set a goal of restoring some 860 million acres of forest globally by 2030. That is an area bigger than India, and enough to soak up 1.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, adding almost a quarter to the current estimated forest carbon sink.
In 2020, at its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum launched One Trillion Trees, an initiative aimed at adding a third to the world’s current estimated inventory of around 3 trillion trees. Even Donald Trump got behind the push, promising to plant a billion trees across the U.S.
But the very unanimity of support for tree planting may reduce the impetus for detailed audits or critical analysis of what is actually achieved at each project. The paucity of follow-up thus far has resulted in a great deal of wasted effort – and money.
Every year, “millions of dollars” are spent on reforesting landscapes, according to Lalisa Duguma of World Agroforestry, an international research agency in Nairobi, Kenya. Yet “there are few success stories.” Typically only a minority of seedlings survive, he says, because the wrong trees are planted in the wrong places, and many are left untended, in part because ownership and management of trees is not handed over to local communities.
Such failures often go unnoticed, believes Duguma, because performance indicators measure planting rates not survival rates, and long-term oversight is minimal because projects typically last three years or less. The result is “phantom forests.”
Too often, argues Duguma, tree planting is “greenwashing” aimed at grabbing headlines and promoting an image of governments or corporations as environmentally friendly. Tiina Vahanen, deputy director of forestry at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, noted recently that many projects end up being little more than “promotional events, with no follow-up action.”
Forest planting can work if the social and environmental conditions are right, and if planting is followed by long-term monitoring and aftercare of the trees. There has been substantial regrowth of the Brazil’s Atlantic Forest following a joint initiative of the government and private sector. But even here progress has been haphazard and much of the increase has been a result of natural regeneration rather than planting.
Tree Weaver 