Tim Rollinson, Director General, Forestry Commission
Part one: the UK Experience
I’m going to start this talk by looking backward - to look at the history of forestry in the UK over the past 2000 years or so, through to today. But, before I do that, let’s look at our two countries to gain a little perspective.
Canada is over 40 times bigger than the UK (998 million hectares land area in Canada and 28 million ha in UK). Canada’s forest area is around 310 million hectares. In comparison, the UK has just 2.8 million ha! But the population of the United Kingdom is nearly twice that of Canada (61 million in UK and 33 million in Canada). That means that there are 30 ha of land for every Canadian citizen, and just one-third of a hectare for every citizen in the UK. Put another way, there is just over 9ha of forest land for every Canadian citizen, and only 0.04 ha for every UK citizen! We’ll return to people pressure (in one form or another) a number of times because a major theme of my talk is the forester’s relationship with society; why public trust is so essential – and yet so fragile; how we came close to losing our public licence to operate; and how we cannot afford to do that again.
Deforestation is not new. By the time the Romans arrived in Britain around 2,000 years ago, forest cover had been reduced to around half of its original state. Even so, when Julius Caesar arrived he was recorded as saying that ‘the whole island is one horrible forest’! This was followed by centuries of further clearance for uses such as woodfuel, ship building, housing, deer hunting and, of course, agriculture.
If you consider the iconic images of Victorian landscapes a century or so ago, they are often treeless and bare. Romantic perhaps in those days, but to an ecologist something akin to a barren moonscape. Those woodlands that did remain after all these centuries of heavy exploitation and deforestation were generally remote or inaccessible, or they had remained useful to society. History taught us an essential lesson – woods that provide society with tangible benefits are more likely to stand the test of time. Woods with a limited range of uses did not survive.
At the beginning of the 20th century, our forest cover was at an all time low - just 5% of the land area.
So our forest history has been one of thousands of years of deforestation. Not only did we lose our forests, we also lost our forest culture. The deforestation had been so prolonged and gradual that we had rather grown used to landscapes without trees. We also lost our forestry skills. We were without adequate knowledge and lacking relevant science. We had virtually to start from scratch.
And that is what we did. Following the First World War, national concern about the lack of timber available to help us fight any future conflict led to the establishment of the Forestry Commission – in 1919. The Commissioners had a single, and simple, objective – to create a strategic reserve of timber. They were provided with funds, manpower and political backing to restore the country’s forest resources.
The early priorities were simple. The nation needed timber and the new forests were created to meet the needs of society at the time. The post-war emphasis was on production. The aim was to establish fast-growing plantations of trees to provide us with timber should we face another war. This mirrored what was happening in agriculture, where policy also focussed on production, to increase yields to feed a nation recovering from the war effort. Agricultural policy safeguarded the best land for food production, so only the most marginal land was available for the new forests.
Plantation forestry was seen as the way forward - as the only means of quickly and efficiently establishing new forests. Many of these new plantations were established on upland grazing areas which had lost their tree cover, often centuries before. The range of tree species that could be grown on this marginal land was heavily restricted - with an emphasis on fast growing conifers in the uplands and Scots and Corsican pine in the lowlands. Some of the new plantations were established on the sites of original native woodlands and, believe it or not, some of these were cleared with herbicides to make room for the productive new plantations.
The simple and singular objective to rebuild the nation’s forest resource was achieved. The forest area in the UK was doubled in just 80 years. 1.5 million hectares of new forests were created. This was the biggest land use change in the UK in modern times and, at that time, one of the biggest reforestation projects in the world.
How was it done? A powerful organisation was created with dedicated research programmes and an emphasis on technological innovation. It had a large motivated workforce. It worked closely with private owners and with the benefit of committed government backing. Foresters scoured the world to find the fastest growing species for our conditions. New scientific and engineering advances were made for example in ploughing, cultivation and fertilisation, soil fertility, tree breeding, road building and much, much more. Among the most successful introductions were Sitka spruce and Douglas fir. As it happens, the last time I spoke at this University was in the early 1990s when, as head of our growth and yield research division, I shared information on the growth of Western red cedar and other fast growing conifers from the Pacific seaboard of North America. I had data from our long-term measurement plots that was of real value to researchers here in UBC.
By 1950, the Forestry Commission employed over 13 thousand people. Today that figure is nearer 3,500. Unsurprisingly, the harvesting and marketing of timber became a core part of the Commission's work.
The creation of the new forests was a big success – the targets of the day were met. But the single-minded objective of building up a strategic reserve of timber led to conflicts – and those conflicts were mostly about loss. Loss of access in some areas, loss of some valuable semi-natural habitats, loss of the Victorian open vistas and loss of some native woodlands.
The young, dense, monocultures intruded into open landscapes - even if they had been forested at some point in the past - often with insufficient or no attention to planning. Abrupt boundaries between the forest and the neighbouring land were often unnatural and awkward on the eye. These perceptions hindered public acceptance of reforestation but they also provided us with some valuable lessons. The first was that there is an innate dislike of change to our landscapes. The longer people have to ‘get used’ to a landscape, the harder it becomes to repair the damage. And the second lesson? When reforesting – do it sensitively and with an eye to the multiple benefits of woodland rather than single purpose imperatives. Lack of public acceptability jeopardises reforestation just as surely as lack of government will - because forestry is every bit as much about people as it is about trees.
The expansion continued in the 1970s and 1980s fuelled by tax relief to high income earners to encourage them to invest in forestry. The media was full of tax avoidance stories of the rich and famous at the time. This led to increasing conflict, especially between forestry and nature conservation interests. This conflict reached its peak at the end of the 1980s when forest expansion moved to some of the remotest parts of Britain. In the far north, environmental groups vigorously challenged continued expansion plans in what became known as the Flow Country.
You can imagine that years later we watched with great interest developments at Clayoquot Sound right here in BC. The War in the Woods of 1993 brought 12,000 protestors with over 800 arrests in a blockade that is now widely quoted as the ‘largest act of peaceful civil disobedience in Canadian history’.
The two issues, albeit more than a decade apart and on different continents, marked a critical tipping point in the relationship between the forester and society. It was clear that the forester was under close public scrutiny.
In Britain, forestry policy and practice had become unsustainable. Policy was challenged and the forester no longer enjoyed people’s confidence. The public trust we so needed, that is was so vital to our business, was in danger of being lost - perhaps for good. Things had to change - and they did. The era of single purpose plantation forestry came to an abrupt end.
From the 1980s onwards - largely in response to public concerns - the Forestry Commission began to revise its objectives. There was a move to increase planting of native species on our own land. Changes to support mechanisms for private owners encouraged them to do the same. Forest expansion slowed dramatically and the focus shifted to management of these new forests that had been created, with the Commission playing a more general stewardship role in forest management.
And so the single purpose objective of creating a strategic reserve of timber was replaced by a much wider remit that embraced visual amenity, recreation, access and biodiversity management. Multi-purpose forestry was the new buzz phrase - long before the term ‘sustainable development’ came into common use.
By the 1990s the Commission was fully committed to this new way of working. The demands of commercial production, recreation and conservation had to be carefully balanced. Forests were recognised as being valuable environmental resources - and managed as such. The post-war forests began to be carefully restructured as they reached maturity. They were reshaped to fit the land form, to look more natural, to fully benefit the wider environment, not to threaten it. The restoration of native woodland in areas like Glen Affric in Scotland and Sherwood Forest in England was widely welcomed, and these initiatives started to have a major and positive impact on the countryside. Foresters worked hand in hand with conservation groups. Wildlife projects helped protect bird species, the dormouse, pine marten and the red squirrel. Consultation with people with an interest in the forest became an essential part of the forest managers’ toolkit.
These trends have continued to the present day with sustainability replacing the stewardship ethic. This move to understand - and then to put into practice - sustainable development has not been straightforward. It required achieving a new balance between the economic, the environmental, and the social values of forests.
We have had to define the principles of sustainable forest management, and then the criteria against which sustainability can be assessed and measured. Working with the industry, with environmental groups, and with other government agencies we produced a Forestry Standard for the sustainable management of forests in the United Kingdom. This was published in 1998.
In parallel, work was proceeding to define a standard for certifying that wood products traded in the market places had come from sustainably managed forests.
A forest certification standard - the UK Woodland Assurance Standard - was published in 1999. Later that year the UK became the first country in the world to have all of its public forests independently certified.
The journey to put sustainable development into practice has not been an easy one. All areas of management, including forest planning, public consultation on management plans, the use of chemicals in forests, the harvesting of wood products, health and safety and employment practices have come under scrutiny.
As a critical watershed in the Commission’s history we were recognised as a world leader in sustainable forest management, receiving a ‘Gift to the Earth’ from WWF International in 2001 for our work on forest certification. Interesting, when you bear in mind that only 10-15 years earlier, the foresters and the environmental organisations had been locked in acrimonious battle.
Today, our relationships with environmental groups are positive and constructive. Indeed, some of the leading lights in the environmental movement have sat on our Board as Forestry Commissioners. ’Multi-stakeholder dialogue’ replaced the polarised debate. Different sides began to understand the others views. Often, they began to realise that their aims were the same!
The broadening of the remit and work of the Forestry Commission has been transformational. I’m going to describe some of the sheer breadth of what we do and what our forests now provide. Today, the Forestry Commission is the largest single producer of timber in the UK - the result of the creation of all the new forests. No surprises there perhaps. But we also find ourselves to be the largest single provider of outdoor recreation in Britain, and the largest manager of rare and protected habitats. The mature woodlands provide an enduring and a quite unique environment for other quiet recreational pursuits such as orienteering, camping and wildlife watching.
We have a commercial business, Forest Holidays, which provides cabin, caravan and camping holidays in 24 stunning wooded locations throughout Great Britain. And with nearly fifty visitor centres, many set within our Forest Parks, we are uniquely placed to tell the stories of our forests. At Dalby forest, one of the most visited places in North Yorkshire, we welcome more than 300,000 visitors every year. The all-timber visitor centre is clad in locally-sourced timber shingles made from Yorkshire larch. The building structure contains added insulation and uses natural ventilation to lower its energy consumption. It is powered by energy from photo-voltaic panels and a wind turbine. Heating is provided by a biomass boiler, which runs on woodchips from the local area. The building uses rainwater harvesting and bio-filtration sewage systems in its wastewater management. Among the many accolades the project has won is this Prime Minister’s Award for Better Public Buildings. This is just one of many similar projects we have around Great Britain.
And we are making increasing efforts to reach new audiences, particularly hard-to-reach groups whose mobility may be limited by reasons of geography, affordability or disability. People flock to listen to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, or bands such as Status Quo, Blondie or Simply Red at one of our many summer Music in the Forest concerts.
Back in 1976 when I joined the Forestry Commission, if someone had said that I would end up being responsible for managing semi-urban fishing lakes designed to provide disabled access, providing forests for classrooms, rehabilitating criminal offenders, and managing rock concerts, I would have been delighted – but in disbelief. But today we do all these things – and more.
Where not so long ago the forest was the preserve of the forester, today forests are for everyone. As I said before, forestry is every bit about people as it is about trees. The restoration of our forest cover has also continued apace, but with a completely new emphasis. We are creating new woodlands on derelict land, restoring old mine workings and contaminated industrial sites. We are creating woods in and around towns for local people. And restoring our native woodlands.
In contrast with Canada, the UK’s primary sector – agriculture, mining, fishing and forestry – accounts for only 1.5% of GDP. Forestry on its own is too small to even register in the UK’s official statistics. So arguments to support forestry based purely on economic benefits cut little ice with the UK Treasury. It might seem therefore that forestry in the UK is in a weak position. From a strictly economic perspective – based on traditional cost benefit analyses – it is.
We have survived a number of ‘near death’ experiences – and learned from them. Our lack of understanding of vocal, politically astute, and media-savvy environmental campaigns in the 1980s was one example. There have been others. The key lesson we have learned is that for forestry to prosper in the UK, it has to be based on benefits that society wants, not only the benefits the forester thinks it wants. Changing this mindset – and changing behaviours – has not been simple.
As I said earlier, we have had to take on many new policy agendas that matter to people and society. Some of these have not been traditionally associated with forestry. In the 1970s we added recreation. In the 1980s, we added the environmental agenda. In the 1990s, we added sustainable forest management. And in the last decade, we took on social inclusion, health and education. Note that nothing gets deleted!
How have we been able to respond to all these new and changing agendas? I’ll set out a few examples: The Forestry Commission has a strong pragmatic and operations-focussed culture. Put simply: if it works use it. And if it doesn’t work, don’t use it. Staff are empowered to try things out and the organisation quickly adopts successful practice. Examples of this include local consultation on environmental issues, local initiatives on the arts - which led to the setting up of national forest sculpture trails. Local partnerships on economic regeneration led to national community forestry initiatives. Perhaps the most striking example is mountain biking where local interest led to the Forestry Commission becoming a global player with some of the best mountain bike trails in the world. This all began with a few rangers in Wales who started mountain biking in the early 1980s. It started to grow, the Forestry Commission noticed and adopted it as a major activity across Great Britain. Today, we have attracted millions of pounds of external investment in our trails and bike shops and we regularly host world championships events.
We have a very short operational management structure so decisions can be implemented quickly and across all parts of the organisation. We also operate a number of integrated functions with good feedback systems. We are unlike much of government where operational and policy functions have been separated.
We are also geographically dispersed across all parts of Great Britain. Because our local managers have considerable autonomy, they can adapt our policy objectives to meet local needs. One size fits no-one!
Although we operate in some of the most remote parts of Britain, the new agendas have taken us into some of our inner cities. This has led to the development of multiple programmes based on community forestry. When, in the current economic recession, so many banks and retailers find themselves reducing cutting back, it is refreshing to find ourselves actually putting more 'branches' into the high street!
In Scotland, community forestry has developed along two strands of urban regeneration and community enterprise and ownership in rural areas. In England, community forestry is often associated with the management of new and existing woodland in areas of urban regeneration. And in Wales the focus has been on the Welsh Valleys, which are post-industrial settlements in south east Wales that had been based on coal mining and steel.
Despite differing approaches, what these urban and urban fringe initiatives have in common is the fact that trees are a means of bringing about rapid and affordable landscape and social change. From our evaluations we have found that good quality environments contribute to local self-confidence and self-esteem. The social scientists in our research agency explain that place and personal and community identity are closely linked - where we come from is part of who we are. So a positive contribution to place also boosts our sense of personal worth.
The rationale for our rural projects has been to help maintain rural settlements whose sustainability is threatened by demographic change and by emigration to the towns. Creating new jobs is a large part of this, but there is also a symbolic dimension. In Scotland, we have transferred ownership or management responsibility to local communities, much in the same way that has been done in Canada with indigenous peoples - though we operate on a much smaller scale - to boost social cohesion. We are also very happy to see our forests used to support social enterprises - businesses owned and run collectively by local people.
But our biggest effort has been going into our heavily populated urban areas and their peripheries. Invariably we work in partnership with regional and national lead agencies and usually we are using regeneration and renewal budgets rather than forestry money. In recent years our focus has been on environmental improvement in deprived urban areas and more recently we have started to promote urban woodlands for their contribution to physical and mental health.
Just coming over the horizon is an interest in using urban forestry to help mitigate the effects of climate change on the urban environment.
Since an explicit social agenda for forestry emerged in the 1980s we have had to find new ways of working - to learn about consultation, participation and governance. Today it is second nature to us to encourage local participation in our decision-making.
Just when we thought we had it all sewn up, we knew what sustainable forest management meant, we knew what society wanted from us, and how to deliver it all, in through the door marched climate change. It refocused our views of the world, shook our thinking, recast some of our real-world paradigms, and caused us to re-examine many of our policies and practices.
The climate change agenda is incredibly important for the forest sector because we have so much to contribute and a clear responsibility to society to ensure that we do our bit.
I often ask people how much they would pay to buy a machine that would take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. A device that would lock up carbon for a long time and pump out oxygen in return. It would need to be environmentally friendly of course, efficient, reliable, easy and cheap to produce and to maintain. Of course, foresters know that machine already exists.
We all know, but are rediscovering, that trees sequester carbon, that wood is a ‘low carbon’ material and can be used as a nearly carbon neutral source of energy. Trees and forests can help society to adapt to a changing climate.
Last year, we commissioned an independent group of experts to assess the potential of the UK’s trees and woodlands to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The outcome of that work, the Read Report, was published in November 2009.
The Report sets out the scientific evidence that will form the basis for many of our policy responses in the future. It has already led to support from government for a major expansion of tree planting in the UK. Forest practice will have to change in response to the move towards a low carbon economy. While most of the policy responses will be positive for those working in forestry, some will not. We can predict that forest managers in the future will be challenged on their current management practices.
A new economy is already developing based on carbon markets. Carbon payments will emerge as a new income stream. New forms of regulation can be expected, including new auditing and monitoring arrangements for carbon stocks, and new forms of certification. All of these will require the engagement of new stakeholders - and will be under scrutiny from wider society.
Thankfully, foresters tend to be pragmatic and flexible and able to adapt to the new paradigms. But, in responding to this new agenda, we must heed the lessons of the past – to listen to what people think, and take them with us, not to force our views of the world on them, no matter whether they be right or not.
What we have seen is an external environment where new policy drivers add to those already in place, rather than displace them. They are all in play together. One consequence of this continued accretion of new agendas is that we take on new stakeholders over the years. Standing back, we have witnessed a broad shift in political power away from ‘land and industry’ toward ‘user based’ interests.
