England to Plant Half a Million Trees Over Three Years, Government Pledges

The UK government plans to have half a million trees planted across England over the next three years as part of an effort to protect against extreme weather, environment secretary Angela Eagle is set to pledge, according to The Guardian.

Under the initiative, mayors, local authorities, charities, and grassroots groups will be given new funding and responsibilities for restoring natural landscapes such as wetlands, river edges, and meadows, the report said. These types of landscape features are understood to provide natural flood management benefits and can help reduce the damage caused by both droughts and heavy rainfall events.

The pledge forms part of a broader approach known as natural flood management, which uses environmental restoration, rather than solely traditional engineered flood defenses, to help slow and absorb water during storms and reduce the severity of downstream flooding. Such approaches have gained increasing attention from UK policymakers in recent years as a complement to conventional infrastructure.

The announcement, described by The Guardian as exclusive, is expected to be formally unveiled on Wednesday morning. The report did not specify the total funding amount associated with the initiative or provide a detailed breakdown of how the tree-planting target would be distributed across different regions of England.

Tree-planting commitments have featured prominently in UK environmental policy in recent years, with successive governments setting targets aimed at both climate mitigation and resilience against increasingly severe weather patterns linked to a changing climate.