Protect Earth’s Maturing Success Metrics
When Protect Earth was founded in 2020, each tree we planted was considered a success and was one more tree to mitigate changing natural conditions in the UK. Even from those early days when planting a tree equated to success, we quickly moved to deeper metrics, such as where a tree came from and where they were going. This evolution saw us think of success as planting the right locally sourced tree and the best option for the planting conditions.
As Protect Earth evolves, our metrics to track what we do and contribute to the UK's environment continue evolving. In addition to recording and reporting on the number of trees planted, we will also talk about how much land Protect Earth has under direct management, how many acres of wildflower meadows we have created and are maintaining, how many kilometres of hedgerow were planted, and how much ancient woodland we restore.
These changes will impact project planning and reporting going forward, so let's look at what is important for Protect Earth to achieve.
Protect Earth's emerging measures of success
Tree planting is great. Trees grow to be woodland pillars gulping up vast amounts of carbon, anchoring soil, and defending against flooding. But, alongside the global climate crisis is the decline of the UK's biodiversity. Recently, it's been discovered that the UK's biodiversity is only a shell of what it was and should be. Reversing biodiversity deficits also contributes to the fight against climate change. This brings us back to Protect Earth's evolving goals and measures - to spearhead a wider variety of projects boosting biodiversity in the UK.
We are not a for-profit lumber company squeezing maximum tree coverage and growth onto the smallest amount of land to satisfy shareholders. We are an environmental charity, and as we view land through this lens, it makes more sense for us to support the development of wildflower meadows as much as woodland.
The natural world is an interdependent system with many plants supporting many insects and animals and vice versa. If Protect Earth is going to be a part of biodiversity development in the UK, we need to expand our measuring stick to account for biodiversity requirements.
Land Under Direct Protect Earth Management
This is a metric of growing importance because of the independence it brings. We partner with landowners who will be managers and stewards of what we create; it's a collaboration. We work together to get the best for all. Sometimes, this means only being able to plant trees, which is okay, and we are not complaining - bring your lands and your ideas. However, to achieve our goal of building more biodiversity, we sometimes face the first task of educating partners on why it's important to do more than plant trees.
When Protect Earth directly manages a piece of land (lowest quality agricultural land or a brownfield site), we can plan for more diversity without compromise. Where suitable, we can create wildlife ponds, wiggle some river, rewet some woodland, spread wildflower meadows and
innoculate mushrooms, put up bird boxes, remove some invasive species, leave some land for skylarks to enjoy, and then develop woodlands on the remaining parts. Can you hear it? Can you see it?
2. Acres of Wildflower Meadows Sown
There are mutually beneficial forces in wildflower meadows and woodlands, resulting in more extraordinary biodiversity. Compared to woodlands, the plants found in wildflower meadows affect the soil differently and attract attention from different insects and animals. However, through tens of thousands of years of co-existence, all these plants, animals, and insects have learned how to live together (sometimes by being food for something else). It is important to simulate this diversity by planting wildflower meadows so declining populations of insects and animals can move in. Wildflower meadows require manual management to stop them from becoming scrubbed up and then turning into woodland, so we'll get neighbouring farmers to come and graze them at the right time of year to spread the seed and remove the remaining dead growth to help the wildflower meadows continue to thrive.
3. Kilometres of Hedgerows Planted
Hedgerows today act as intra-wood carriageways. They help small mammals safely move amongst woodlands.
While you can't see it, hedgerows are like roadside Little Chefs for birds who, needing a break from flying, will take the opportunity to rest up in a hedgerow before the last push home and find a quick snack. Imagine not having roadways between towns - meaning basics like food distribution, and more wouldn't happen. Hedgerows serve a similar purpose, creating natural corridors from one woodland to another.
Also, as corridors, hedgerows tend to be narrow and far more effective over a small footprint than woodland. Not all partners we work with will have space available for a woodland, yet by establishing wildflower meadows and hedgerows, they can contribute to enhancing biodiversity.
With all these analogies, we hope it makes sense why we are encouraging more hedgerows to be established.
4. Ancient Woodland Restoration
Ancient woodlands are amongst the most fertile and rich places in the UK. They can contain fungus and lichens that grow ever so slowly yet are worth far more than their weight in supporting biodiversity and fighting climate change.
Some ancient woodlands have been mistreated. Take, for instance, High Wood - our ancient woodland in Cornwall. It was almost entirely converted to a fast-growing, for-profit plantation. Since taking the land on, our primary goal has been to restore the woodland, getting it on a path to once again being a temperate rainforest and a thriving ecosystem, as if you could teleport back in time to when it grew naturally and untouched. There are more such woodlands throughout the UK that would benefit humans and the environment far more by being restored to natural woodlands than what they may be today.
How Protect Earth's goals will influence future projects
It should be no surprise that our goal of developing more biodiversity through the UK will affect future projects. But how?
We will focus less on the "number of trees" and work with our data volunteers to improve the metrics we track, covering these three main concepts but generally moving towards a few ideas.
Acres of land dedicated to various habitat types will become more prominent on the site and announcements than the number of individual trees planted.
Helping donations go to specific things, so you can donate to plant more field trees to shade livestock or meters of hedgerow to act as wildlife corridors, all equally important as creating blocks of woodland and shelterbelts on farms. We can easily share those metrics with everyone, too.
Putting more emphasis on our land fund - where we seek donations enabling us to take long-term leases and buy land to green more naturally, so we can increase the land we directly manage.
Because of our broader view and what will most benefit the UK's environment, we will encourage partnering landowners to share our broader view and be open to planting more than trees, and directly managing more of our own land makes it easier to do more natural regeneration, too.
We need to create functioning ecosystems involving much more than trees, so we're asking our donors and funding partners to care more about rewetting peat bogs, wiggling rivers, and creating wet meadows. Over 2024, we'll post more about this, helping people understand why these habitats and carbon sinks are important.
We may also be more selective in who we partner with. Resources have limitations, and if we feel we haven't planted enough wildflowers for a season, we may feel planting a new woodland isn't the right time for us, or perhaps the time would be better used to rescue an existing woodland from invasive species. Doing all of this other work would previously have made us look bad as the number of trees wasn't increasing exponentially, but diversifying our workload based on biodiversity development requirements is far more important than focussing on tree planting alone.
To sum up
Protect Earth is growing into a more holistic charity concerned about protecting and boosting biodiversity in the UK.
What is important to us so we can all boost biodiversity has us thinking about what we look at per project and over time. The broader biodiversity goal stretched our focus to include direct land management, more acres of wildflower meadows being sown, and the restoration of ancient woodlands, with more metrics coming soon.
We hope you feel the same and continue supporting the Project Earth community's efforts.
Feel free to drop us your thoughts, comments, or questions.
