Tackling Climate Change

A Global Emergency

The Climate Change and Biodiversity Crisis

Existing CO₂ levels in the atmosphere are already at a record high point and are causing global heating. There is now so much CO2 in the atmosphere that global heating is having dramatic effects on the environment throughout the world and significantly affecting human communities.

What is the Trust doing?

Addressing our own carbon footprint

Following the Trust’s Climate Change Declaration in November 2019, we have been looking at ways to tackle the causes of climate change. For example, by reducing our own emissions and using renewable energy for our electricity supply, caring for the land that captures and stores carbon, exploring flood mitigation options and restoring wildlife habitats that are threatened.

Natural solutions to climate change

Woodlands and Continuous Cover Forestry

Trees and woodlands are the ultimate weapon in fighting climate change.  They create carbon sinks which absorb atmospheric carbon and lock it up. The entire woodland ecosystem plays a huge role in locking up carbon, including the living wood, roots, leaves, deadwood, surrounding soils and its associated vegetation. 

Continuous Cover Forestry (CCF), unlike clearfell or group felling, focusses on individual tree selection to increase timber increment (growth) across all sizes of tree in the forest, rather than aiming for one canopy of even aged trees which are felled and replanted at a predetermined age. Woodlands, mostly planted by Telford Development Corporation in the 1970s, now under SGCT’s management since 1991, are gradually being converted to Continuous Cover over the accessible 60% of 220 hectares. At first there is a loss of carbon through the removal of up to 15% of tree trunks from thinning, but there will be an increase in soil carbon over time as the 30-40% of woody biomass in the branch wood breaks down into humus, as well as from increased growth of the remaining trees post thinning.