In January 2018, the UK Government kicked off the year by backing a project to create a new Northern Forest.  

The Government will provide £5.7 million to increase tree cover in this area.  The project will cost £500m over 25 years, and the balance will be raised by charity. 

The Woodland Trust is leading the scheme with local Community Forests. 

The project will see 50 million trees over 25 years.  They will stretch from Liverpool right over to Hull, embracing the major cities of Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Chester and Hull alongside other major towns along the M62 corridor. 

Shared from New World 360

According to the Woodland Trust, benefits of this new forest include:

• Improving air quality in towns and cities
• Mitigating flood risk in key catchments
• Supporting the rural economy through tourism, recreation and timber production
• Connecting people with nature
• Helping to delivery better health and wellbeing for people by providing access to green spaces
• Providing a rich habitat for wildlife to thrive

Woodland cover is at just 7.6% there, below the UK average of 13%.  The EU has an average of 44%. 

Tree planting rates are very low with there being only 700 hectares against the Government’s target of 5,000 hectares a year, so this project should help.

However, while it is one thing to create new forest, it is another to destroy ancient woodland which the Government is hell bent on, in part to create room for this ridiculous and incredibly expensive HS2 railway.  

If this Government really cared about forests and woodlands, it would stop destroying ancient woodland and stop routing the high-speed train route through them.  

Five Community Forests that sit within the proposed areas for the Northern Forest – you can find out more about the Community Forests here. 

The river Ganges is a lifeline for over 500 million people across India. The river is workshipped as Ganga Mata, the Divine Mother.   She has sustained life for thousands of years.

As this clip from You Tube shows (thank you to the BBC.co.uk for it), the Ganges is in trouble, thanks to human use of plastic.

Wherever we are in the world, we all need to try to cut down on the amount of plastic we use and look for alternatives.   

I've made a start using bamboo toothbrushes and I love them!  If we can each look at what we use plastic for and see what alternatives we can use, that would be a great start.

I'm off to buy a blueberry bush to put in a pot in the garden - that will save the plastic packaging they've come in before. 

There's good news for 10,000 acres in Mexico. 

They've been saved by supporters of the World Land Trust.

Acre by acre, the supporters and Buy an Acre donors have saved the forest in Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve.

The World Land Trust and Grupo Ecologico Sierra Gorda have worked together for 10 years to protect the range of forest habitatws in Sierra Gorda.

The area is home to 100 mammal species, including Black Bear, Jaguar, Neotropical Otter and Puma.  It's also home to 339 speices of birds such as Military Macaws and Great Curassow.

Protecting the world's forests mean that we will have water, oxygen, climate regulation and beautiful landscapes to enjoy.  We are giving land back to the species who live there.

"Walking through the reserves we have made is like travelling back in time, back to when Mexican forests were ruled by the jaguar and filled with species we consider rare today."

Roberto Pedraza Rulz, GESG

This success is increasing the amount of land within the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve that is actually under private proteciton and management by conservationists.  GESG has focused their attention on the most important and threatened areas to create a network of privately protected areas in the eastern part of the reserve.

The success is thanks to the suppoters of Buy an Acre, and grand funding and generous corporate supporters such as Puro Fairtrade Coffee.  And work continues to protect the area.   Sierra Gorda's habitats include Cloud Forests, Conifer Forests, Oak Forests, Tropical Forests and Riparian Forests. 

Click here to visit the World Land Trust

So over 600,000 trees are to be planted at Doddington North Moor in Northumberland in the UK.

The scheme will be the largest woodland creation scheme in England in the last 30 years.  The Forestry Commission gave it a thumbs up, and it expects it to generate jobs.

The trees will include broadleaf and conifer trees and they should cover 350 hectares (i.e. the same space as 650 football pitches would take up).

Environmentally, it should:

• Boost red squirrel numbers, currently estimated to be 140,000 (compared with 2.5 million grey squirrels)
• Store 120,000 tonnes of carbon
• Manage flood risks

The scheme has been developed with the help of Government funding.  It will receie grants for planting.  Environment minister Therese Coffey said: "Our forests and woodlands are some of our most vital and cherished natural assets, and planting more trees is at the heart of our ambition to protect the environment for future generations.

"Doddington North Moor will make a significant contribution to our drive to plant 11 million trees across the nation and is a fantastic example of the kind of tree-planting schemes we want to see more of.

The Conservatives pledged to plant 11 million trees in five years, a pledge upheld in their 2015.  Unfortunately, what they propose to plant with one hand, they will destroy in the name of "progress" with the other - the HS2 railway being an example.

The scheme is expected to begin in March 2018 and take two to three years to complete.

Meantime in India, 66 million saplings were planted by volunteers in just 12 hours in a record-breaking environmental drive.

School report?  England could and must do better.

In South Africa, a Formula E racing car went head-to-head with a cheetah at a remote runway.

The aim was to highlight the threat to wildlife posed by climate change. 

The car won - just.  Both car and cheetah hit 60 miles an hour from a standstill in less than 3 seconds.

Mind you, there was no comparison in beauty and grace, to my mind.  The cheetah won hands down. 

The founder and CEO of Formula E explained that we have one planet.  Electric cars can play a key role in reducing carbon dioxide emissions around the world. 

Formula E noted that there are only 7,000 cheetahs left in the wild.   The company has a strong desire to raise awareness of the threats they face, such as an ellegal trade of cubs for pets, loss of prey because of habitat loss and the fragmentation made worse by climate change.

The organisers of Formula E hope the electrified racing series will encourage people to change to smart, electric mobility, and make society a cleaner one for future generations, enabling the habitats of animals such as the cheetah to be preserved.

Present at filming were a team of experienced animal wranglers, an animal locomotion expert, representatives from Cheetah Outreach, the Endangered Wildlife Trust and Animal Issues Matter - they are all trained to monitor the welfare of animals on set.