Trees help to cool and clean our air, lock up carbon, reduce flooding and provide sustainable raw materials, which makes them a major player in slowing down climate change. Tree in a Million is NCZ’s reforestation campaign in partnership with the Forest of Marston Vale Trust, and its target is 10,000 trees over five years, delivering more than £1 million of benefit to the UK.
The reason it is run here rather than overseas is that the benefit is measurable and local. The Forest of Marston Vale Trust publishes what the Forest already delivers every year: 4,917 tonnes of CO2 removed from the atmosphere, an annual cost saving to the NHS of £4.95m, 167 full-time-equivalent jobs supported locally, and a £6.91m boost to the visitor economy. Planting adds to a landscape whose effects are already counted, not to an abstraction.
It matters commercially as well as environmentally, but it is not a substitute for measurement. Planting complements a measured and reduced carbon footprint; it does not replace one. NCZ’s position throughout is that emissions are measured first, reduced second, and only genuinely unavoidable residual emissions are balanced.
Last reviewed: September 2026