Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 1:54 pm on 26 January 2022.
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 Just this week, the Wales strategic ash dieback group met with a range of stakeholders to provide feedback on draft guidance to support landowners in the management of their ash trees, and we'll be publishing that this spring.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.