Coventry has successfully received almost £400,000 towards a reforestation project for 13 sites across the city.
The council applied for funding from the Forestry Commission’s Local Authority Treescapes Fund (LATF) earlier this year, and it has now been confirmed that we will receive £ 294,915, alongside an additional £91,383 from match funders to plant 151 semi-mature trees and 7,068 smaller, ‘starter trees’ created from seedlings.
The LATF project reflects a global initiative called Tiny Forests, where communities create native forests with small footprints that attract biodiversity to areas which because of their location within cities, for example, have previously not been wooded.
Planting more trees will help iron out social inequalities, providing all communities with access to green spaces – a study by the New Economics Foundation found that in Coventry the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic community had the lowest exposure to the local natural environment in the West Midlands Combined Authority.
More trees in the city will also help to manage the extreme temperatures that are becoming much more frequent with climate change. They will also help to reduce airborne pollution, can act as natural flood defences, and help to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
There are currently around 574,000 trees across Coventry, 285,000 of which are managed by the council, equivalent to 1.5 people to each tree and providing coverage of 11.6% of the city – below the regional and national averages of, respectively, 14.4% and 16%.
The LATF funding will form part of our plans – with partners – to plant an additional 360,000 trees by 2033, one for every member of the city’s population.
Overall, just over half of the city (49.8km2) is a potential plantable area, with almost a fifth of the city being public land which has the potential for tree planting.
Cllr Patricia Hetherton, Cabinet Member for City Services, said: “This is such fantastic news for Coventry as it will help us to kickstart our ambitious plans to have hundreds of thousands more trees over the next decade and we can’t get wait to get planting!
“The benefits of the Tiny Forests project in our city are plain to see – they increase the general health of the city and its residents, they form part of our climate change strategy and provide social value in helping to reduce the inequalities in our communities.
“We’d like to thank the Forestry Commission for their funding, our partners, and also the hundreds of volunteers who have and will continue to work with us on this project.”