The case for a West Midlands forest

So: one idea I hope gathers force is the idea of a West Midlands Forest – to help drive our green industrial revolution, and reconnect with our history as the home to the ancient Forest of Arden, the mighty Midlands forest made world-famous by William Shakespeare in As You Like It.

Becoming a carbon neutral region will be that little bit easier if we start replanting woodland. And where better than in the region that was once the home of the ancient forest that once spread across the green heart of England.

Just one new national forest has been replanted in the last 1,000 years. The National Forest will soon stretch for 200 square miles from the ancient woods of Charnwood in the East Midlands to Needham Wood which is 14 miles north east of Lichfield. It was begun 25 years ago, has cost around £25 million – but has brought in investment of nearly £1 billion! That’s sounds like a pretty good return on investment to me.

We could never ever plant enough trees to absorb all the carbon we produce in our region. The latest government figures show that the West Midlands releases about 32 mega tonnes of CO2 each year; about half a tonne of carbon for each person every month.

A recent review of the literature suggests that in a 25 year old forest, each tree – in a maple-birch forest for instance – absorbs around 3lbs/ CO2 a year. So I asked my son to run the maths. And here’s the answer: we’d need 28 billion trees to absorb all the carbon we produce in the West Midlands.

To plant that number of trees you’d need a space of 64,000 square miles. That’s about the size of Tunisia!

I think it is fair to say, that is not going to happen. But a 200 Sq mile forest should be do-able, doubling the size of the National Forest and taking out about 3% of our CO2 emissions each year.

So, how could we do it?

Well, one approach would be to approach the big employers in our region starting with Birmingham Airport and ask them to become one of world’s growing numbers of carbon neutral airports; by reducing their carbon footprint and by buying ‘Woodland Carbon Units’ (WCU) to offset the carbon they can’t eliminate. Each WCU represents a tonne of CO2 which has been sequestered in a verified woodland – and lots of companies and charities now sell these units to plant trees.

So, why don’t we create a region-wide forest cooperative to work together to find the land – and ask our companies to buy the trees. I know a lot of primary schools who’d like to supply the children to do a bit of planting!

Obviously it’d be wonderful if we could find a way of connecting the new National Forest up in Needham with some of remnants of the ancient forest left in the region; like Sutton Park, once a royal forest of the Anglo Saxon kings as far back as the 9th century. Or Rough Wood in Walsall which was once covered most of the Borough. Or the last of Arden Forest.

This legendary forest, through which no Roman roads were built once stretched from the river Avon to the river Tame. Bounded by the old Roman roads of Icknield Street, Watling Street, Fosse Way and a prehistoric salt track leading from Droitwich, it covered the land from Stratford to Tamworth from which the great cities of Birmingham and Coventry were carved.

In the Doomsday Book, about a third of North West Warwickshire was wooded. By the Middle Ages much of it was cleared. But what was left was made world-famous as the setting for William Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

Today, there’s almost nothing of it left; a few pockets of trees, field boundaries and the odd ‘mighty oak.’ How magical it’d be to start replanting it.

But planting forests shouldn’t simply be about grand projets; it should be a way we turn old derelict industrial sites green once more.

In other parts of the world – American cities like Austin, Texas and King County, Washington – councils are running pilot projects with City Forest Credits (CFC) which companies use to offset their carbon emissions by buying credits for tree planting or preservation. Talking to businesses here I think something similar would be massively popular.

Building forests is not a substitute for radical system change to decarbonise electricity, buildings and transport. But every little counts. And it’d be a powerful way to reclaim a long, lost part of our history.