Summary

Overview

The English Tree Planting Programme will contribute to the Government’s commitment to increase tree planting to 30,000 hectares per year by 2025. Alongside environmental and economic benefits, there will be social benefits associated with this. Therefore, this planting programme provides a valuable opportunity to assess public attitudes to new planting and the social benefits associated with it, including how this may vary across diverse populations. It is also an opportunity to help us better understand why some people can’t or don’t benefit from woodland creation and expansion and what we can do about it.

This research will pilot a longitudinal social research approach. This is research which assesses how attitudes, benefits and barriers change over time in relation to new tree planting. We will look at this from an individual and a community perspective.

This project is part of the Nature for Climate Fund.

Research Objectives

  1. Identify and develop connections with forest/woodland sites and communities to study over time;
  2. Explore attitudes, motivations, actions, barriers and benefits linked to new woodland creation and expansion (new planting) for diverse communities.
  3. Develop and test a proof-of-concept* for longitudinal research to study how attitudes, motivations, actions, barriers and benefits for communities local to new planting change over time.

*proof-of-concept refers to establishing through testing whether such longitudinal research is feasible, what it would contribute, and how it could be achieved.

Research Questions

  1. What do local community members who have visited the site think about the intervention (new planting and expansion of woodland) and how it has come about?
  2. What do local community members who have not visited the site (but are aware of the intervention) think about it and how it has come about?
  3. What impact has the intervention had on local community members who visit/engage with the site?
  4. What impact, if any, has the intervention had on local community members who have not visited (but are aware of the intervention)?
  5. How do we best capture the above change in attitudes, motivations, actions, barriers and benefits linked to woodland creation and expansion for diverse communities over time?
  6. What lessons can we take from the above to inform such interventions to help them improve provision of benefits and to maximise access/engagement with such sites (where this is an aim) and minimise negative impacts (on site and visitor)?

Latest Update

In scoping this work we produced a literature review and developed a theoretical framework.

From this we decided to take a mixed methods approach:

Questionnaires

Focusing on communities within 30 mins walk of the new planting sites, we designed and tested a survey questionnaire with this hyper-local population. This approach follows engagement and benefits from the new planting sites at a community scale.

The first wave of testing utilised and compared face to face and Computer Aided Telephone Interview methods. Using the learning from this first wave we are designing a second wave, to be delivered in the late autumn 2024.

Interviews

Focusing on individuals who visit their local new planting site, we are using a qualitative approach to understand how their engagement with the site and related benefits has changed over time.

Given the short funding window we are utilising a case biography approach and repeat interviews to expand our frame of reference. We have completed the qualitative data collection, having conducted three waves of interviews.

Analysing the interview data after each wave has enabled us to adapt the approach and also to feed in to wave 2 of the quantitative survey questionnaire approach.

Current funding for this project finishes in March 2025. A report will be available in Spring 2025.

Downloads

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International Association People-Environment Studies (IAPS) Conference 2024: presentation slides

In July 2024, the novel methodology utilised for the qualitative part of this project was presented at the IAPS 24 conference in Barcelona, Spain. The PowerPoint slides from this presentation are available here.

Pptx File | 5.36 MB

Related research

Publications

  • Karlsdottir, B., 2023. Qualitative Longitudinal Methods for Forest Social Science: A Review (in publication).
  • O’Brien, L., FitzGerald, O., Bursnell, M., Ambrose-Oji, B., and Edwards, D., 2021. England Tree Planting Programme: Experimental Plots. A scoping report for social research (internal document).

Funding & Partners