New woods, new lives,
new landscapes

A conference on creating woodland for our future
October 2006

Conference context

The UK is one of the least wooded countries in Europe yet forests, trees and woods are fundamental to our well-being as individuals and as a society. Historically, support for an expansion of woodland cover had the primary objective of production of utilisable timber but today there is strong awareness of the many additional benefits which woodland can provide. Government forestry policy objectives include a continued expansion of woodland cover, yet rates of woodland creation are falling year on year.
The conference aimed to stimulate a genuine debate about the necessity of woodland expansion throughout the UK. It aimed to:

• widen appreciation of the environmental and social services that woodland provides and how further woodland creation is essential to provision of those services

• demonstrate how woodland creation is an essential element of an ecosystem approach to the environment

• debate how a target for woodland creation might be constructed and how, in broad terms, it might be delivered.

Click here to see the abstracts and papers presented by our speakers.

17th and 18th October 2006 – The Lowry, Manchester

Woodland Creation Conference proceedings (PDF)