Street Tree Working Strategy for Sheffield sets out new direction for the care of the city’s highway trees

Street Tree Working Strategy for Sheffield sets out new direction for the care of the city’s highway trees

[lead]The first Partnership Street Tree Working Strategy for Sheffield has been released today and will be recommended to Sheffield City Council for adoption next week.

The Working Strategy has been developed by a group of partners including representatives of Sheffield Tree Action Groups (STAG), Sheffield City Council (SCC), Amey, independent experts from Natural Capital Solutions and Leeds City Council as well as the Woodland Trust, with Liz Ballard, Chief Executive of Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust in the role of Independent Chair. [/lead]

Care of street trees presents unique challenges as they are often coping with things like traffic pollution, road salt, compacted soils and drought. Despite the sometimes tough highway environment, the Working Strategy recognises the contribution of street trees to health and wellbeing, air quality and other ecological and environmental benefits. It outlines new ways of working around six outcomes to ensure the city’s network of street trees is well-maintained and sustained for the future by:

  1. Sustainably and carefully managing our street trees in accordance with best practice
  2. Ensuring our street trees are more resilient through the type and age of trees we plant and also how we manage the current street tree stock
  3. Increasing the value and benefits that flow from our street trees
  4. Contributing to a more equal distribution of urban forest across the city to promote health & wellbeing
  5. Increasing street tree canopy cover
  6. Involving the wider community in caring for and valuing street trees

Liz Ballard, Chair of the Sheffield Street Tree Strategy Development Group said:

‘We set out to develop an exemplary Partnership Street Tree Strategy for Sheffield that values street trees for the benefits they bring to people, the city and the wider environment. And we believe this Working Strategy is just that.  As a group we wanted to produce something positive and visionary – for the city to collectively view street trees as an asset, helping us to improve air quality, reduce flood risk, support wildlife and store carbon.

This strategy aims to learn from the past in order to deliver our vision for the future of Sheffield’s street trees. “

As part of the strategy development, the group collated and commissioned baseline data for Sheffield’s street trees.  This included commissioning a report based on an inventory of Sheffield’s highway trees and drawing on over 35,000 records from the ‘Streets Ahead’ database.  The report, thought to be the first of its kind for street trees, values the ecosystem benefits of Sheffield’s street trees using i-Tree Eco, a state-of-the-art open source software system used worldwide to assess and manage urban tree populations.  This ‘Sheffield Street Tree i-Tree Eco Inventory Report’ has also been released today alongside the Working Strategy.

As a supplement to SCC’s Trees & Woodland Strategy, which was approved in December 2018, the Working Strategy has emerged through true collaboration, discussion and dialogue among the partners involved in its development.

Liz Ballard said ‘This Working Strategy, if adopted by all partners, wil