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ARBOREAL ANNIVERSARIES Over the past year, we have celebrated some significant forestry milestones. Here, we reflect on the centenary of the Forestry Act of 1919, that established the Forestry Commission, and two decades of FSC forest management certification by some of the UK forestry industry’s major players.
©DGA Forestry
A century ago, following the end of the First World War, woodland cover was at an all-time low in the UK and many of the forests we know today simply did not exist. In September 1919, the Forestry Commission was established by the Forestry Act to undertake a tree planting mission of truly epic scale, replanting our woodlands, creating a future supply of home-grown timber, and providing thousands of jobs for demobilised servicemen. The vision of reforesting Britain had captured the political and public imagination. Fast forward 100 years and woodland cover has more than doubled, with over 10% of England and 6% of Wales now covered by trees. In the late 1990s, the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly saw responsibility for forests split by national borders, with the creation of Forestry
Commission England, Scotland and Wales as sub-departments of the Forestry Commission of Great Britain. Further changes followed in April 2013, when Forestry Commission Wales merged with other agencies to become Natural Resources Wales (FSC®C115912), and in April 2019, when Forestry Commission Scotland was split into two separate bodies: Forestry and Land Scotland (FSC®C123223) and Scottish Forestry. Publicly owned forests in England remain the responsibility of the Forestry Commission, through its sub-agency Forestry England (FSC®C123214). Today, these devolved agencies are continuing the good work started by the Forestry Commission in 1919 and last autumn they all celebrated another important milestone: 20 years of FSC certification.
