Member News
11th March 2011
The Woodland Trust welcomes the recommendation that the Green Investment Bank must be more than a fund.
The environmental audit select committee has published its report into the Green Investment Bank. The report highlights that the GIB must be a bank and not a fund, be free of political interference, remedy market failures and be given a significant sum of money for capitalisation if it is to successfully deliver transformative change.
The Woodland Trust welcomes the call for the GIB to be more than a fund and was pleased to see that the committee noted our evidence which highlighted woodland creation as a possible investment option and a means of marketing a green ISA. It was also great to see our trustee, Elliot Mannis, quoted on a number of occasions in the report.
However we were disappointed to see the term 'green infrastructure' used to describe a range of engineering solutions to climate change. Decarbonising our energy supply will be crucial in mitigating climate change. But for green infrastructure to have genuine environmental meaning the Natural England definition should be used: 'green infrastructure is a planned network of multifunctional green spaces and inter-connecting links which is designed, developed and managed to meet the environmental, social and economic needs'.
Green infrastructure therefore compromises our natural treasures such as native woodland, SSSIs, urban parks and gardens, nature reserves and land in agri-management.
For the GIB to be a genuinely green bank it must find mechanisms to fund conservation objectives such as native woodland creation alongside projects to decarbonise our energy supply. As the Read Report noted, increasing the rate of tree planting would make a significant contribution to absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.
Woodland creation is also a vital action in helping to tackling contemporary challenges such as climate-change mitigation and adaptation, wildlife loss, improving public health – both physical and mental – and shaping places where people want to live, work and spend their leisure time.
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