A £5 million HS2 Woodland Fund, administered by the Forestry Fee, is supporting new woodland creation and Plantations on Historical Woodland Websites (PAWS) restoration initiatives across the Part One route between London and the West Midlands.
Up to now, a complete of £1.75 million has been allotted throughout 35 schemes. This has resulted within the restoration of over 66 hectares of historical woodland, together with the planting of over 110,000 timber; and over 130 hectares of recent native woodland, with round 220,000 timber planted.
The fund gives assist for landowners within the space 25 miles across the Part One route. This goes past HS2’s current environmental programme to plant 7 million timber and create over 33 sq. kilometres of wildlife habitat.
James Hicks, Biodiversity Coverage Specialist at HS2 Ltd mentioned:
“We’re designing HS2 to be a railway that respects the pure setting by conserving, changing and enhancing wildlife habitats with a brand new ‘inexperienced hall’ alongside the route. It will create a community of larger, better-connected, local weather resilient habitats and new inexperienced areas for folks and wildlife to get pleasure from sooner or later. “Over and above our required mitigation, our HS2 Woodland Fund gives vital further monetary assist for areas close to the route to assist compensate for unavoidable impacts to historical woodlands.”
Sir William Worsley, Forestry Fee Chair, mentioned:
“We should make sure that woodlands and habitats impacted by HS2 are successfully restored and guarded. “The HS2 Fund will proceed to facilitate the creation of recent woodland and convey new life to historical woodlands across the Part One route between London and the West Midlands.”
The HS2 Woodland Fund on Part One gives funding to revive and preserve PAWS websites, together with restocking with native timber and shrubs, and related objects together with fencing, gates and pure flood administration objects. It additionally gives funding for creating, defending and sustaining new native woodland via the England Woodland Creation Supply – a part of a collection of Forestry Fee initiatives to assist woodland creation and tree planting throughout England.
West Wycombe Property in Buckinghamshire is likely one of the initiatives which has acquired funding to revive considered one of their historical woodland websites and is now seeing the advantages. Over 15,000 native timber have been planted on a web site that may be very properly utilized by the general public, which was beforehand planted with non-native Japanese Larch that had suffered from injury by squirrels.
David Hunt, Forest Supervisor at West Wycombe Property mentioned:
“With the funding accessible from HS2, it made it an apparent alternative for us to go for going again to revive native historical woodland on the property. The advantages of planting woodland on historical websites is absolutely wildlife conservation, biodiversity and panorama versus business woodlands. The funding from HS2 has been actually vital for us, and anybody on this woodland can see the advantages of going again to native tree planting.”
HS2 Ltd are working to increase the Woodland Fund for Part 2a with an extra £2million of funding accessible. A £1million HS2 Woodland Fund was additionally introduced on Part 2b in January 2023 which shall be launched following Royal Assent.
Extra data on the HS2 Woodland Fund, together with the places of schemes delivered thus far, may be discovered on the HS2 web site: https://www.hs2.org.uk/building-hs2/environmental-sustainability/ancient-woodland/
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Photographs right here: https://mediacentre.hs2.org.uk/sources/f/setting/tree-planting-2/hs2-woodland-fund
