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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how much funding his Department has provided for (a) woodland creation, (b) peatland restoration, (c) saltmarsh restoration and (d) other natural carbon solutions in the latest period for which data is available; and through which schemes this funding is delivered.

The £750 million Nature for Climate Fund will support peat restoration, woodland creation and management until 2025. Nature for Climate Fund deployment in future years is dependent on analysis of previous year’s performance across projects and workstreams.

For 2022/23 alone we have made:

• Over £25 million available through the England Woodland Creation Offer
• £9.4m of additional funding to support tree nurseries, and development of workforce and skills to support the creation of woodland
• £44.5m NCF funding for Woodland Creation Partnerships and Community Forests
• £7.8 million for a new Woodland Creation Accelerator Fund (WCAF) to build Local Authority capacity to plan new woodlands
• £2 million to support DLUHC’s Levelling Up Parks Fund
• £12.8 million available to the Peatland Restoration Grant Scheme.

Funding is agreed parliament to parliament via spending review periods, so beyond 2025 when the Nature for Climate Fund draws to a close, funding is yet to be agreed and determined.

The £80 million Green Recovery Challenge Fund is enabling nature recovery across England, from North Northumberland to the tip of Cornwall. Through this funding, we are supporting 159 projects, ranging from new ‘insect pathways’ in our countryside to tree planting projects in deprived urban areas. These projects include woodland creation, peatland restoration and saltmarsh restoration. Round one of the fund ran between 2020-22 and round two is running between 2021-23.

A number of estuarine and coastal habitat restoration initiatives are also underway. The management of the Environment Agency’s Restoring Meadow, Marsh and Reef (ReMeMaRe) initiative, amounting to £90k in 2022-23, is funded through the Water Environment Improvement Fund. ReMeMaRe is working to restore our estuarine and coastal habitats to benefit people and nature.

Natural England is leading a four-year £2.5 million EU-funded LIFE Recreation ReMEDIES project running to October 2023, which aims to restore seagrass and maerl habitat in five Special Areas of Conservation.

Finally, we are also working to increase private investment in nature. The £10 million Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund, which runs to March 2024, is also supporting three projects with almost £300,000 of grants, to explore, develop and then test methodologies to measure and verify the carbon storage potential in saltmarsh habitats. This includes a project to develop a Saltmarsh Carbon code from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.