Is Labour’s policy of planting 2bn trees by 2040 realistic?

Labour’s environment manifesto pledges to plant 2 billion trees by the year 2040. The policy has raised some eyebrows: it amounts to 200 trees a minute every day for the next 20 years, which sounds like a lot.

Is it out of sync with other parties?

In reality, the policy is ambitious, but not actually impractical or unrealistic. While the party’s commitment is the biggest tree-planting pledge of the main parties, the others’ are in the same order of magnitude:

The Conservatives want to plant 30 million more trees every year, and the Lib Dems and SNP say 60 million a year, and the Greens say 70 million. Labour’s policy amounts to 100 million a year – higher, but not totally out of line with the other parties.

What about historically?

So are they all mad? Isn’t that a lot of trees? The answer is yes, that’s an increase in tree-planting, and to historically very high levels – but you may be surprised how close we’ve got in the past.

In the mid-to-late 1980s, as many as 50 million trees a year were planted – the equivalent of roughly 30,000 hectares a year.

In fact, 50 million trees were planted in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh by volunteers in 2016, breaking a Guinness world record attempt.

The annual rate of planting is half what was done in the 1980s: 13,400 hectares, between 20 and 25 million a year depending on density. That’s up on recent years, but down on previous decades.

How can this be practical?

A single employed tree-planter can, in the right circumstances, plant several thousand trees a day. If this sounds strange, consider that they’re not actually planting a full-sized tree, but a sapling – and then putting a plastic tube around it. This takes not a matter of hours, or even minutes – but seconds. You’d need a small army of people employed full time to reach the target, but that’s apparently the plan.

The only real fundamental restriction is running out of places to plant them. But that isn’t going to happen: the UK has rather low forest cover compared with most European countries, just 13 per cent, and 10 per cent in England. Average tree cover in the EU is 35 per cent, so the UK is rather behind on that.

Do we actually need all these trees?

Expert thinking is that we do need to be planting more trees. The Committee on Climate Change says the UK needs 32,000 hectares more a year by 2050 to combat climate change. That equates to about one and a half billion trees. So while Labour’s policy is slightly overshooting the target, it’s in the same ballpark as experts are suggesting.