The UK’s Massive Tree-Planting Campaign Isn’t Moving Fast Enough

Accelerating along a series of twisting grass tracks, Charles Nicholls pushes his off-road golf cart up the hillside, passing hundreds of saplings sheltered by vertical plastic cylinders. Reaching the top, he clambers off, his thick, dark eyebrows jiggling beneath a mop of gray hair. From that height, Nicholls admires a classic British view: grazing sheep, bright green fields and jagged hedgerows extending in all directions. But like many places in the UK, something is missing from this patch of central Wales: forests. Apart from the planted saplings, the only visible trees are confined to narrow patches along roads, rivers or the edges of farm plots. “We absolutely think of ‘England’s green and pleasant land,’ ” Nicholls says, quoting a line from a William Blake poem that’s been taught to generations of schoolchildren. But, he says, it’s “not necessarily green including forestry.”

Compared with most of its neighbors, the UK is relatively treeless, its woodlands felled centuries ago and never replanted. Just 13% of its territory is covered by forest, compared with roughly a third or more in France, Germany and Spain. Along with forestry experts, scientists and policymakers, Nicholls is part of an unprecedented effort to bring back trees and, in the process, transform Britain’s climate strategy. The UK has set a goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Even the most ambitious scenarios don’t call for a complete end to fossil fuel use, so meeting the target will be impossible without finding ways to capture carbon from the atmosphere