Overview

The Active Forests programme (‘Active Forests’) aims to create a physical activity habit for life for visitors to the public forest estate in England.  

This page summarises details of the monitoring and evaluation of phase 3 of the Active Forests programme, called ‘Removing Barriers’. This phase runs for three years from 2023-2026 across 20 sites, from large forests in national parks to peri-urban forests.

The mission for phase 3 is to provide opportunities for everyone to actively engage and connect with the nation’s forests to improve their health and wellbeing. It has three goals: 

1. Create accessible and inclusive environments 
2. Maintain, grow and diversify the opportunities available across the nation’s forests at our forest centre sites 
3. Deliver health and wellbeing benefits and tackle inequalities 

It includes four main areas of delivery: 

1. The core programme 
2. Self-led wellbeing trails 
3. Inclusive forests, focused on improving physical accessibility  
4. A social prescribing project called ‘Feel Good in the Forest’.

Phase 3 retains an emphasis on core activities – walking, running and cycling – but also continues to complement this with other low intensity wellbeing activities.

Social prescribing project (Feel Good in the Forest)

The social prescribing project builds on the social prescribing pilot. It is delivered at four Feel Good in the Forest sites (Chopwell, Guisborough, National Forest and Thames Chase) in addition to ‘mini-projects’ at other Forestry England sites. Feel Good in the Forest aims to: 

• Reach people with physical or mental health conditions and those facing the greatest health inequalities  
• Support people to be more active, build resilience and feel restored, connect with others and the forest environment, feel empowered to try new experiences, and to be included in their forest  
• Have a legacy or progression that shows the funded activities have resulted in longer-term engagement with nature 

To find out more about the Active Forests programme and Forest Research’s wider involvement in monitoring and evaluating it across other phases of delivery, visit the Active Forests overview page.