Woodland 'helps save NHS £1bn a year', figures suggest, as experts calculate benefit of trees to the economy
UK woodland helped save the health service a whopping £938 million in just one year - removing more than 18m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air.
The value of trees and wooded areas to the UK economy was laid bare in an analysis by experts at the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which looked at the various benefits and calculated the equivalent boost in cash terms.
They found that the health service benefitted to the tune of almost £1bn thanks to the positive effect of trees acting to remove pollution from the air.
Overall, they found that tree-covered areas provided a value equivalent to £5.3bn to the UK economy in 2017, and represented a total asset value of £129.7bn - with the timber economy counting for just £8.9bn (6.9% of that).
In fact, they estimated that the non-market benefits of woodland exceeded the market benefits of timber by approximately 18 times - with timber representing just over £275m out of the £5.3bn total annual value of woodland in 2017.
Wooded areas based in cities had a huge positive effect, helping to cool the air enough during hot days to save an estimated £229m in worker productivity and lower air conditioning costs.
Meanwhile, members of the public made around 475m visits to wooded areas in 2017, spending approximately £515.5m.
It comes after the government vowed to act on promises to plant hundreds of thousands more trees nationwide, using the National Forest in the East Midlands as a model for improving tree cover across the whole UK.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said in January that it wants a 12% level of tree cover in the UK by 2060; and the National Forest - based in Swadlincote but covering 200 sq miles of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Staffordshire - has helped plant 8.9 million trees over the past 25 years, as well as attracting more than £1 billion of investment.
Woodland currently covers around 3.19m hectares of land in the UK - up from 3.05m hectares a decade ago, an increase of 4.4%.
The Woodland Trust is campaigning for this to be increased significantly, launching its Emergency Tree Plan and arguing that trees can play a vital role in the fight against climate change.
The charity's chief executive, Darren Moorcroft told ITV News Central that the figures from the ONS underlined the important role trees play, not only in soaking up CO2 and improving biodiversity but in economic terms too.
He said more than half of the 1,285 woodland species tracked by the UK's State of Nature report were in decline - particularly those which rely on diverse native woodlands - while one in 10 were in danger of extinction.
“[These figures] back up why we have developed an Emergency Tree Plan which sets out our campaign to protect woodland and why woodland expansion is so important," he said.
"The good news is that there is a real win-win here. The UK can help to tackle the loss of biodiversity at home and the global climate crisis by protecting, restoring and massively expanding its native woodland and tree cover.
"Well-located tree cover can also reduce the risk of flooding; create thousands of new jobs; provide sustainable timber and boost the economy; and of course, make people happier, and healthier."
He said it might cost money to increase the amount of woodland - but that such an effort would be a "fantastic investment in all our futures".
The ONS counted ‘woodland’ as any area covered by trees, including both plantation forests and natural forests, as well as lower-density and smaller patches of trees.
The report states:
The full report can be found here.