Our ambition is to help local authorities demonstrate the real value urban trees to unlock significant new investment and grow their urban forests.
Go straight to the 10 step guide
As the social, economic and environmental need for equitable urban forests rises, the availability of public funding is falling.
Right now, local authorities are facing unprecedented financial challenges when it comes to managing trees from planting through to maturity. The time is now to start thinking of innovative ways to fund our urban forests and invest in the future of our towns and cities.
This funding toolbox is your guide to understanding the real value of your urban trees and woods and unlocking new and additional funding and investment for long-term maintenance and growth. It will help prepare you to build new blended funding and finance models, where public funding is supported by other sources of philanthropic and private funding.
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What are our funding challenges?
What are our funding opportunities?
Quantify your natural urban assets
The time to start is now - 10 step guide
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Local authorities have historically funded their urban forests through public money, with support from grants. But key financial and logistical challenges are making this increasingly unsustainable.
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These challenges are not going away. So what can we do differently that allows us to tackle them head on and open up wider financing opportunities?
Urban forests are an integral part of our urban green infrastructure and should be thought of as critical infrastructure for towns and cities.
Green infrastructure already delivers a vast range of social, economic and environmental (ecosystem) benefits. Public parks alone in London are estimated to have a gross asset value of £91.3bn. In the North this figure is around £80bn. Action now to improve trees and green spaces could help expand these benefits even further (e.g. by £10 billion over 60 years in the North) to improve the lives of more people who currently have less access to trees.
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A natural capital approach assigns monetary value to the environmental benefits (or ecosystem services) of trees based on their size and structure, their proximity to human beings and the local climate. These values are based on the estimated future social costs avoided using figures set by government. In general, larger trees, and those in densely populated areas, provide the most benefit. There are a number of ways to more accurately calculate values. Forest Research have tested methodologies in their valuation of all UK non-woodland trees.
Understanding why trees have value enables you to establish a robust investment case for equitable urban forestry projects.
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Working out the value of an urban forest is an important part of your long-term funding strategy*.* It’s an important part of building the case for investment to manage and protect the valuable assets you already have. Historically, health and social benefits have been difficult to quantify and there’s evidence that the carbon stored by urban trees has been vastly underestimated. But we now have new and more refined tools to help us quantify their worth. **Step 2 of our 10-step guide gives an idea of how you could build on this to attract future investment.
Many local authorities are already quantifying their natural urban assets, laying the groundwork for informed decision-making and targeted investment strategies. Birmingham City Council worked with Treeconomics to estimate the costs and benefits of their urban forest based on the interventions set out in their Urban Forest Master Plan.
The Ignition Project’s street tree evidence database can give you an idea of the ecosystem services that street trees can deliver. The Tree Equity Score UK can help you calculate the value of an urban forest over a certain area. Used with a cost modelling tool, you can carry out a high-level cost-benefit analysis that can give you data such as:
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Take a leaf from…
[The Black Country Consortium](https://treeconomics.co.uk/project/black-country-urban-forest-asset-valuation/#:~:text=Primarily this was a tree,diseases threatening the urban forest.) and the West Midlands Combined Authority carried out similar valuation exercises using i-Tree Eco surveys. Together these valued the asset value West Midlands urban forest at £73.25 billion.
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