Pretty much in a direct response to the debacle of the lost trees at Cotham School and the fuss that residents and I made about it, and subsequent cases where developers have wanted to fell trees as part of building or rebuilding works (like at Colston's Girls School), Council officers have been working on a clarification of the policy around replacement trees. I met with them yesterday to discuss progress.
It's all looking really good. The problem is that the planning policy is 13 years old and rather vague. It can be read to mean that when you chop down a tree you simply have to replace it with another one - so one a 15m tree gets replaced by a 3m sapling, with all the resultant loss of canopy and visual amenity.
The Council in the process of replacing its planning policy, something which I am heavily involved in. One of the new targets which we have set is to increase tree canopy coverage from 13% at present, probably to 30% - this hasn't been set yet, but the principle of increase has, provided that the Secretary of State signs it off.
The new approach would make clear exactly how many trees would need to be replanted to replace any lost ones. This would be pragmatically based on the size of the existing trees, so one-for-one for little ones, but maybe five or more for large ones. The net effect would be to grow the tree canopy in the city over time. All good news! Of course, this doesn't give developers free range to chop down trees at will - it means that they would think twice about incurring the additional cost of replanting, hopefully pushing them to retain mature trees where at all possible.
The new guidance will be going out now for consultation with developers and with folks like the Tree Forum, with a view to implementation in the summer. The outcome should be fewer mature trees chopped down and more new ones planted - a good result!
1 comment:
you are clearly not educated in the space requirements of trees and constraints posed in urban areas. As you are also lacking in the knowledge of looking at the bigger environmental picture. Shame on you !
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