Chapter 10 Conclusion

Through this work we have brought together the most comprehensive national compilation of government-funded woodland creation projects in the country. By unifying diverse spatial submissions and annual returns into a single, coherent evidence base, and applying a set of scientific indicators to them, we can now provide new insights into where and how woodland creation is being delivered, and how it generates outcomes for nature recovery, net zero targets, and other services.

This work helps to track progress of NCF by providing a trajectory of benefits to 2050 and beyond. This helps provide a picture of outcomes that may take years or decades to fully materialise, and monitoring programmes can use the estimates as a measure of maximum potential benefits to track success against. The evidence base compiled through this project provides a strong foundation for identifying future opportunities, supporting delivery of statutory woodland creation and nature recovery targets.

10.1 Legacy

The NCF Indicators will inform the wider NCF programme evaluation, including a value for money analysis. The indicators and modelling approaches provide a transferable and scalable framework for assessing environmental and social benefits in future nature-based initiatives. By integrating spatially explicit data and standardised evaluation metrics, this approach enhances the ability to track long-term ecosystem changes and measure progress toward national conservation and climate targets. As such, we hope that they will find applications in the planning and evaluation of new project pipelines for nature recovery.

Future programmes can build on this methodology to improve decision-making, optimise site selection and refine land management strategies to maximise carbon sequestration, biodiversity gains and other ecosystem services. All the project code and data will be passed on to Defra alongside training materials, to facilitate the use and adaptation of the methods for new purposes.

There are already projects within Defra that are planning on using our benefit estimates for NCF to:

  • Inform the NCF programme evaluation, including the spending review
  • Model projected benefits for the business case of the NCF successor programme
  • Support a research project on biodiversity benefits from different woodland types

This project generated most indicator results down to site level, and we hope that they will be re-analysed to fuel more research and exploration into how benefits from planting programmes are delivered, spatially and thematically. The supporting data generated for the project, such as the planting masterfile and the habitat baseline (Appendix A), can also help support further analysis, within Defra and beyond. These are examples of questions that the data could help answer:

  • What benefits does NCF deliver in rural vs urban locations?
  • Are there more opportunities for planting in areas where existing sites are especially effective in delivering outcomes?

10.2 Concluding remarks

As pressures on the environment continue to increase, being able to measure projected outcomes of large-scale nature recovery schemes will be critical for meeting policy targets. This project provided an assessment of social and environmental benefits expected from the Nature for Climate Fund tree planting and produced datasets that can continue to generate value through future analysis. We hope that the approach developed here can support future woodland creation programmes to deliver the greatest possible benefits for climate, people and nature.