TWO Tavistock schools have planted 240 trees to improve biodiversity and help offset climate change, with the support of a community-led environmental group.

Year 7 students at Tavistock College and Mount Kelly School were helped to plant the saplings in their school grounds by the Greenwood Tree Group, a small group of local volunteers formed in April to take up national charity The Woodland Trust’s offer of free trees to community groups around the UK.

Tavistock College has used saplings to create a woodland habitat in a section of wet field on its grounds. They hope to establish a marsh area surrounded by trees to support wildlife and provide a carbon ‘soak’ over the next coming decades. The students have been learning about how trees benefit the environment and aim to continue to extend the woodland.

Meanwhile, students at Mount Kelly school have planted native tree saplings including oak, downy birch, hawthorn, hazel, rowan and blackthorn, to enhance a now well-established copse of 1,000 trees and bluebells, planted in 2000.

The school also has many beautiful mature trees within its grounds, with plans to replace any that have fallen victim to old age or disease such as ash die-back with at least two new saplings.

The Greenwood Tree Group says that it hopes to continue to work with the community, schools and town council, to maintain what it describes as Tavistock’s ‘beautiful tree rich landscape.’

It is highlighting how in the past 400 years, the UK has lost a significant proportion of its woodland, with only 10% of land now being wooded – comparing poorly with Europe, where the average cover is 30%.

The Greenwood Tree Group says it is part of an ‘energetic and dedicated move’ across the country to plant trees to offset carbon emissions and help mitigate climate change, as well as create habitats to enure a future for native wildlife. Trees not only provide a natural carbon soak but shade and coolness, over increasingly hot summers, to protect the soil.

Last year, the Intergovenmental Panel on Climate Change, which provides scientific data across the world, called on governments to stop burning fossil fuels and also take action to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

A Greenwood Tree Group spokesperson said: ‘Our community’s youth have taken up the gauntlet and started to act to protect our planet’s future.’