About Us
Here in the West Midlands more and more people are seeing just how much trees really do matter. For our towns and major conurbations, they bring much needed green landscape – green 'architecture' – into the hard edged urban scene. For our superb rural areas trees define the landscape and provide a vital economic resource. Climate change and wood energy alternatives are climbing higher up the regional agenda as are healthier lifestyles, better community involvement and more opportunities for leisure and recreation. Well managed trees and woodlands can make an important contribution in all these areas.
In the eight years since the Government's England Forestry Strategy was launched, much has been done to increase the contributions that trees, woodlands and forestry make to our lives. Over the same period the process of regionalisation has taken place with decision-making responsibilities increasingly devolved. The West Midlands Forestry Framework therefore gives us the opportunity to work together to drive the agenda forward enhancing the uniquely multi-functional resource that can, for example, simultaneously provide a leisure facility, a habitat, a workplace, and an educational resource, while helping to clean the air, reduce flood risk and screen noise whilst concurrently producing environmentally friendly building materials, improving the landscape and sequestering atmospheric carbon.
