Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how much and what proportion of woodland creation funded through the Nature for Climate Fund is met through (a) natural colonisation and (b) tree planting; and in which areas these woodlands have been created.

The Nature for Climate Fund (NCF) offers include a range of different types of tree planting to support the establishment of “the right tree in the right place”. The England Woodland Creation Offer includes Additional Contributions to support nature recovery, of which natural colonisation is one of them. 192 hectares of natural colonisation has been established so far. Other NCF planting grants also support natural colonisation, but we do not hold data on the amount of planting that has been created through natural colonisation for those schemes’

The Forestry Commission produces statistics on all new planting of woodland for the UK. These can be found in Forestry Statistics (https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/statistics/forestry-statistics/) on the Forest Research website. These statistics are reported for each financial year in thousands of hectares. The latest available figures are for 2021-22. These figures include woodland created through natural colonisation but it does not specify a separate figure for woodland created through natural colonisation.