As the second biggest landowner in Northern Ireland, we have ambitious plans to deliver a large-scale planting programme of one million trees across 11,300 hectares of our land by 2030. Planting trees improves water quality, captures carbon, mitigate floods and enhances the natural environment.
To date, we’ve planted more than 450,000 trees across our sites in Carrickfergus, Fofanny, Dunore, Annalong and Stoneyford. In the 2024/25 planting season, we secured funding from DAERA Forest Service to draw down from Forest Expansion Scheme funding to plant c.250,000 across c.140 hectares of our land near Woodburn reservoir. This is the biggest woodland creation site in Northern Ireland in the last 30 years.
Through working with The Woodland Trust Northern Ireland and Forest Service to harness their expertise and existing funding mechanisms, we can deliver a diverse range of native trees to encourage our flowers and fauna to flourish.
Matt Huddlestone, Senior Outreach Manager for the Woodland Trust Northern Ireland commented: “One of the Woodland Trust’s main objectives is to create new native woodlands. In Northern Ireland this is urgent considering we live in the least wooded area in Europe with under 9% tree cover. Thanks to our partnership with Northern Ireland Water, we now have access to large areas of land within their care, and this is a huge opportunity for us to increase tree cover here on a landscape scale. The Woodland Trust wants to see a world where woods and trees thrive for nature and people. We create quality native woods and get native trees growing to benefit nature, climate and people into the future.”