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Are We Planting the Wrong Trees for Britain’s Future?

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  Are We Planting the Wrong Trees for Britain’s Future? “Planting a tree is an environmental decision that may outlive the person planting it.” Planting trees is probably one of the few environmental actions almost everyone agrees is a good thing. Trees absorb carbon, provide shade, reduce summer temperatures, intercept rainfall, provide wildlife habitat and can make almost any street, garden or field more attractive. But perhaps we need to ask a slightly more awkward question. Are we planting the right trees? A tree planted in Britain in 2026 may still be standing in 2100. It could experience a climate significantly different from the one in which we planted it. That changes the question from: “What tree grows well here?” to: “What tree will grow well here now, survive the next 20 difficult summers, cope with wet winters, resist future pests and still be useful to wildlife in 70 years?” That is a much harder question. A Tree Is a Very Long-Term Investment When we plant b...
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The Environmental Cost of Keeping Cool

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  The Environmental Cost of Keeping Cool If Britain Embraces Air Conditioning, Can We Do It Without Creating a New Energy Problem? “The question is no longer whether British homes will need cooling. It is how intelligently we choose to provide it.” For most of my life, the British house has been designed around one overriding problem: how do we keep warm? We fitted double glazing. We filled cavity walls. We piled insulation into lofts. We sealed draughts. We installed better heating controls. All perfectly sensible. But our climate is changing the design problem. Increasingly, there are days when the problem is not keeping heat inside the house but desperately trying to get it out again. In England, around 3 million homes were reported as getting uncomfortably hot in 2024 , and the proportion reporting overheating has risen from 7% in 2019 to 12% in 2024. The Climate Change Committee warns that, by the middle of the century, as many as 92% of existing UK homes could experie...
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