In recent years there have been some devastating floods, almost every winter in some places due to (once in 100 year) weather events occuring quite a bit more often than that.
In late 2015, many areas were hit, including Cumbria, Scotland, Lancashire and Yorkshire, Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man. There was 316.4mm of rainfall at the Honister Pass in Cumbria (thats almost 12 and a half inches) in 24 hours on 5 December 2015.
There is a lot of talk of flood defences and money (or lack of) to build these. One thing that I never hear anybody talking about, are the reasons why such large amounts of water come down rivers in the first place. Its this amount of water in a short time that causes the floods, often the water is gone a day or so later, apart from in the houses which have been flooded, which are totally ruined along with the lives of the people who lived there.
Well, it could be global warming that is making weather more severe, hot or cold. A lot of people don’t agree with it, maybe partly because they don’t understand how it can snow in April if we really have global warming (this is wrong as it happens – global warming allows more water vapour in the air due to the warmer temperatures and its this water vapour that causes our weather).
Anyway, whatever the reason, it rains. Hard. We don’t have many trees in our uplands, so there is nothing to soak up all that water, and it cascades down into rivers, into lower areas, and then our towns and villages and floods them.
My theory for a long time is that if we had more trees (for sure we would need a lot more), then the water might not come down as fast, some of it not at all (because the trees would soak up some of it by drinking it), then the risk of flooding would be lower.
What caused this blog post is that I watched CountryFile the other week and they stated that farmers are <blockquote>paid to remove trees from their land!</blockquote>.
On looking into this further, it appears that farmers receive a subsidy for the amount of land they have that is suitable for sheep grazing, and the subsidy is calculated on this amount. So if they have trees at the edge of a field, the subsidy is reduced.
The Guardian has written many articles about trees and farming subsidies over the years, I have linked to just one in this sentence.
The other effect that planting more trees would have, is that trees consume carbon dioxide and produce oxygen for us to breathe. If we are filling the world with more things that produce carbon dioxide, why not fill it with more things that consume it as well?
There aren’t many trees where I live and even so there is evidence of trees, even entire woods have been removed in many places near me. I searched for a report on how many trees the UK has, and it turns out as of 2011, we had 15% of our land, as opposed to 37% in other European countries and 30% worldwide. So to catch up with the world average we would have to double our number of trees by planting 3,814 million trees. If we planted these in the right place, would it help our flood risks? Would it help with global warming by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide? I would be it is a drop in the ocean, but surely a step in the right direction that would give us other benefits of woodland, walks, etc. and habitat for wild animals and birds..
The final thing I will say about this report is that it disappointed me by saying yes we were down at 15% but it didn’t have any strong words or recommendations to increase this. Instead it just notes that the averages are going down everywhere.
Other Information
The environment agency website has a map that shows flood risk.
State of the UK Forests 2011 Report.
I hope somebody thinks about the effect of trees and considers planting many more. For sure it will take a lot of trees. I hope they do, and I hope it works. What better ideas are there? Millions spent on flood defences (which may still be needed) but which can still be breached?