3. Will the Minister provide an update on the progress of the Welsh Government's woodland creation project? OQ57523

Yes. The trees and timber deep-dive exercise identified the actions we will take to increase woodland creation, including a new funding scheme and changes to the way projects are verified. These are being implemented and overseen by a delivery panel, which I chair.

Diolch yn fawr, Dirprwy Weinidog. Ash dieback is a common fungal based disease that is sadly shared amongst much of Wales's ash tree population, the third most common tree in Wales. Within my own consistency of Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire, we have seen first hand how damaging this disease can be. On the Stackpole Estate alone—which I had the pleasure of visiting on Monday to plant a tree as part of the National Trust blossom watch campaign—the trust will be felling over 900 ash trees this winter, at a cost of £30,000. Across Wales, 6,500 ash trees have been managed because of ash dieback since 2020, and a further 20,500 trees have been designated as requiring safety works. Therefore, what assurances can you as Deputy Minister give that our current tree planting strategy is exceeding the number of trees being culled due to this disease, and will the Welsh Government's woodland creation tree count figures accurately reflect the total number of trees in Wales, including those removed, not just the number of new trees planted? Diolch yn fawr. 

Well, Sam Kurtz is right that ash dieback is a serious threat to our tree population. Some 97 per cent of the ash population across the UK is estimated to be vulnerable to being infected by ash dieback. Just this week, the Wales strategic ash dieback group met with a range of stakeholders to provide feedback on draft guidance to support landowners in the management of their ash trees, and we'll be publishing that this spring. So, we know we also need to make sure that the trees we plant are resilient to future diseases. It is likely, as a result of climate change, that our trees will be facing a greater range of threats, and that's why it's also important that, when we do plant trees, we don't plant monocultures. So, the UK forestry standard, for example, that all tree planting that we fund has to be compliant with, requires at least five different varieties of tree to be planted to partly guard against this kind of threat. 

As the Member knows, we do have ambitious targets for planting more trees, guided by the advice of the UK Climate Change Committee on the number of trees we need to tackle the climate emergency. And of course, they also tackle the nature emergency. So, the deep-dive exercise, which was designed to unblock barriers, identified that we need to plant more than 80 million trees within the next nine years. And we need to do a variety of trees, both trees for crops, so that we can create a Welsh timber industry, but also trees for biodiversity, and deciduous trees as well, but trees primarily on farmland. We work very closely with farmers, and they are taking the lead in this. If every farmer planted a hectare of their land with trees, then we'd be meeting our target. So, we don't want to see massive plantations as a rule, we want to see every farmer and every landowner, as well as communities, embrace tree planting as both a good for climate change but also a good for health and well-being in their communities. 

Apologies for my technical problems. Minister, I hear reports that Natural Resources Wales are buying family farms in Wales in order to plant trees, with concerns that this land will be no longer food-producing land and that the value of the land increases. This is not only damaging to agriculture, but also means that less food will be produced here in Wales. Is this part of the Government's forestry plan, and do you believe that it's right that NRW should be buying land for these purposes, if that is the case? Thank you. 

Well, I think we all agree we need to plant more trees, therefore it follows that we need more land to plant those trees on. The UK Climate Change Committee estimates that we need around a 10 per cent shift in land use from food production to tree planting, both, as I say, as a crop for timber production, but also for carbon sequestration. And I also note that, as part of our partnership agreement with Plaid Cymru, we're looking to be more ambitious than the 2050 net-zero target and looking at what it would take to reach net zero by 2035, and I can hazard a guess that that work is going to show we need to be planting even more trees. So, I would hope that Mabon ap Gwynfor is supportive of our efforts to plant more trees, and there will be some change of land use to do that. But, as I said in the answer to Sam Kurtz, if this is done at scale by all landowners and farmers, there only needs to be a modest change of use on the land they currently farm. We are working closely with the Woodland Trust, who have an excellent initiative to encourage farmers to plant hedges and edges. Every farmer has an element of their farm that they would be happy to use for tree planting, and that's the conversation we want to have with each of them as part of the sustainable farming scheme, to identify that land and make it easier for them to plant that land. It's not helpful to continuously be questioning whether or not tree planting is something we need to do and constantly finding reasons for stymieing the progress. It has to be done sensitively, it has to be done with communities. I want it to be led by Welsh farmers, but it is going to involve a small degree of changing land use.