01-04-2016 - Stuart Goodall
Wood is used to make everything from paper to houses but we are now importing too much from overseas
We’re barking up the right tree with target to plant 100,000 more by 2022, writes Stuart Goodall
YOU don’t have to live in a forest, for wood to be all around you. It might not always look like wood, and it’s rarely ever labelled as wood, but so much of our everyday environment is made from it.
You can get up from your wooden bed, open the wooden door in your timber-framed house and spend all day living, working and playing surrounded by wood. Food packaging, kitchens, furniture, buildings, newspapers (if, like me, you still enjoy turning and folding your pages), park benches, the carton your coffee or tea comes in and much more. These products are made from wood and it comes from forests.
If you buy a Sunday newspaper, you’re not consuming an Amazonian rainforest. Most paper is recycled, with the original wood coming from softwood trees, like the ones we grow. And when a tree is harvested it’s replaced with another in a cycle of regeneration that locks up carbon, provides jobs and benefits wildlife.
This link from wood products back to the forest is widely appreciated in most other countries, but we lost our “wood culture” many decades ago, even in Scotland. Now the UK is the third largest net importer of wood in the world. We expect others to produce our raw materials.
Scotland has standards for sustainably managing forests that are unsurpassed anywhere in the world and which are far, far better than most – we should take more responsibility for the products we consume and reap the benefits of well-managed woodland.
At a conference in Edinburgh last week, Confor launched a new animation that seeks to remind people of the link from our everyday lives back to the forest. We also presented a forestry manifesto for the Scottish election. At its heart is a call to achieve Scotland’s tree planting targets and maintain the flow of wood.
Just four months ago, Nicola Sturgeon made a public promise to deliver Scotland’s target of 100,000 hectares of new woodland (about the size of four Edinburghs) in the decade to 2022, at a rate of 10,000 ha every year.