Chapter 1 Nature for Climate Programme and Evaluation
1.1 The NCF programme
The Nature for Climate Fund (NCF) Programme, supported by DEFRA, is a major initiative aimed at tackling climate change, enhancing biodiversity and delivering a wide range of other environmental, social and economic benefits. It provides funding to accelerate tree planting, peatland restoration and habitat creation across England, contributing to the UK’s legally binding targets for nature recovery and net-zero commitments (DEFRA 2023).
The focus of this project was on specific environmental outcomes, with the NCF programme aiming to:
- contribute to net zero by sequestering carbon
- support wildlife by creating habitats
- improve air and water quality
- act as a nature-based solution to mitigate flood risk
These themes are the focus of this report. Beyond these outcomes, the fund also generates social and economic benefits. Regulating services such as urban cooling and noise regulation, improved access to nature, and increased opportunities for volunteering and community engagement can all boost physical and mental health. NCF aims to create social cohesion, engage youth, raise environmental awareness through environmental education, and enhance the sense of place, aesthetic appeal, and heritage features of our landscapes. The Fund contributes to eco-tourism and green job creation, aligning nature recovery with economic development and sustainable growth.
1.2 Project aims
The Nature for Climate programme required a series of indicators to evaluate ecological outcomes directly attributable to the planting across five key areas: carbon sequestration, biodiversity, air quality, flood regulation and water quality. A key goal was to capture regional and thematic variation in the outcomes. To achieve this, the indicators were developed using a spatial framework that can be scaled from site- to programme-level. Results retain attributes such as delivery partner and planting type (woodland vs trees outside woodland), so that benefits can be extracted for specific subsets of the NCF programme: a data portal facilitates interactive exploration of the benefits. Finally, outcomes from woodland creation are not typically immediately realised due to the time taken for trees to mature, so the indicators were developed with a temporal component to forecast benefits up to 2050.
1.3 General approach
The general process of measuring the impact of the programme is as follows:
- Prepare a detailed habitat map on which to apply the indicator for a pre-planting benefit assessment;
- Model the change in habitat resulting from the Nature for Climate interventions: this involved embedding spatial planting data (all planting up to 2024) into the habitat baseline;
- Re-run each indicator with the updated habitat map;
- Where a time component is involved, benefits are accrued annually until 2050 (reporting point) following assumptions or published curves of annual rates as a function of tree age;
- Measure difference in pre- vs post-intervention benefit values. This can be done within the site boundaries (site-level net change3), within larger units of interest (“cookie-cutter” approach, e.g., ward-level, local authority), using bespoke grouping (e.g., project partners, type of planting), and for the whole programme.
The five indicator themes output one or more metrics that can be expressed in biophysical terms. The underlying models draw primarily on evidence sources recommended by the Enabling a Natural Capital Approach service databook (DEFRA 2025). Where possible, models have been adapted to provide a temporal forecast of benefits, recognising that benefits from woodland creation can take years or decades to be fully realised; the underlying assumptions are discussed in the relevant chapters.
1.3.1 Potential vs realised benefits
The long-term success of NCF will depend on a range of ecological and management factors outside the scope of the current study. Tree mortality is typically highest in the first few years post-planting, but can be mitigated with appropriate maintenance (Defra and Forestry Commission 2021). Growing and mature trees can remain vulnerable to threats such as browsing or bark stripping from mammals, vandalism, pests and diseases, and weather events such as storms and droughts (Gill and Morgan 2010; Forest Research 2022). Seed provenance can affect how trees respond to site conditions, which in turn may change, with more extreme weather events driven by climate change (Forest Research 2022). Delivery partners have their own monitoring processes in place, and the programme is looking to commission further work on monitoring.
It is important to note that this report sets out maximum potential benefits for the 2050 horizon based on the planting conducted in the first four years of the programme. The key assumption is that the sites will be maintained appropriately and become healthy woods and trees outside woodlands. Importantly, this does not mean that the results are incompatible with any level of mortality. Our indicators are not sensitive to finer measures of planting structure such as stocking density (except the carbon metric which can be customised if the information is known). Therefore, as long as a site can be deemed to retain its original design (i.e. a woodland can still be called a woodland and has not become trees outside woodlands), it can still function as an ecosystem and deliver benefits (Herbert et al. 2022).
References
Results are calculated at the site level but not reported here or in the portal. This avoids data privacy concerns, and avoids misinterpretation. The indicators rely on data too coarse in terms of spatial resolution to be precise at site level. Summarising by geographic units or theme ensures that under- and over-estimations average out to provide more robust estimates.↩︎