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Tree planting

Past tree programmes and achievements

One of the Mayor’s priorities is to make our city a greener, cleaner and healthier place for all Londoners to live, as well as for future generations. To achieve this, the Mayor is working to protect and improve London’s tree canopy by funding tree planting and other green infrastructure programmes. Since 2016, over his first two terms, the Mayor funded the planting of over 620,000 trees across London.

These programmes have supported progress towards the Mayor’s targets for increasing London’s tree canopy:

  • The Mayor has a target in the London Environment Strategy to increase tree cover by 10% (from 2016 levels) by 2050.
  • The Mayor has also committed to creating at least 20 hectares of species-rich woodland by 2025, and 200 hectares by 2050.

More information on past (i.e. closed) tree programmes can be found below.

Find out more about London's trees and woodlands.

Past tree programmes

In 2022, the GLA was awarded funding from Defra’s Tree Call to Action Fund for a three-year period to March 2025. This funding supported eight members of the London Urban Forest Partnership to accelerate delivery of nine priority actions in the 2020 London Urban Forest Plan. Find out more about the nine projects delivered.

Between 2022 and 2025, the Mayor invested over £4 million in a tree planting programme to protect and future-proof London in response to climate change. The programme targeted areas with low tree cover and high vulnerability to climate impacts. It involved several initiatives, further described below: Trees for Young Londoners, Free Trees for Londoners, a Pilot Tree Pit Survey and Trees for Streets.

In 2023, the Mayor launched a school tree planting pilot project as part of the Young Ambassadors programme.  Nearly 800 students from 17 schools planted over 350 trees in their school grounds and local communities. The Mayor worked with The Conservation Volunteers (TCV) to deliver the project. An event to celebrate the Mayor's funding of half a million trees was held at a Young Ambassadors School during a tree planting activity day.

Following this successful pilot, the Mayor launched the Trees for Young Londoners programme in 2024. The Mayor provided funding for The Tree Council and Action For Conservation to expand their existing school tree planting programmes across London. The programme delivered over 4,500 trees in 38 schools across 19 London boroughs. Over 1,200 young Londoners took an active role in planning and planting their trees and were introduced to careers caring for London's Urban Forest.

Find out more about The Tree Council and Action For Conservation’s work on the Trees for Young Londoners programme.

 

Since 2016, the Mayor has funded over 270,000 free trees for Londoners — including nearly 80,000 trees distributed during a single weekend in National Tree Week 2019.

Between 2022 and 2025, the Mayor partnered with The Conservation Volunteers (TCV) through the I Dig Trees project to give away nearly 150,000 free trees to community and faith groups, housing associations and schools. Free training was also provided by TCV on how to successfully plant and care for trees.

In 2022 and 2023, the Mayor funded 1,000 new trees in priority areas across the city. The Mayor also sponsored one further tree for every tree sponsored by a resident or local business in a participating borough.

The Mayor worked with Trees for Streets (now Trees for Cities) to deliver the programme.

The London Tree Officers Association’s Vacant Tree Pits in London Report found that poor knowledge of tree planting locations was a significant barrier to increasing street tree coverage. The Mayor provided funding for a pilot survey of vacant tree pits in a sample London boroughs. Treeconomics were commissioned in 2024 to carry out the pilot in Selhurst ward, London Borough of Croydon. The method and findings from this survey is informing current tree planting projects.

Working with London boroughs, the Mayor secured two major grants from Defra’s Urban Tree Challenge Fund (UTCF), matched with additional Mayoral funding:

  • Over £2 million to plant nearly 7,000 street trees across 20 boroughs (Jan 2020 – Mar 2021), targeted in areas of low canopy cover (UTCF Round 1).

  • Over £2.7 million to plant over 6,100 street trees (Nov 2021 – Mar 2025), targeted in areas of low canopy cover and high deprivation (UTCF Round 3). 

For later Urban Tree Challenge Fund rounds in 2023–25, the Mayor continued to offer match funding to help boroughs access this fund. A further £1 million in match funding was provided for over 6,000 trees planted across 18 London boroughs.

The Mayor’s Green and Resilient Spaces Fund supported the creation of 50 hectares of publicly accessible woodland in Enfield Chase, building on earlier woodland creation supported by the Mayor.

In 2020, the Mayor awarded £1.2 million from the Greener City Fund to help create two new accessible woodlands in London’s Green Belt, totalling 85 hectares and over 120,000 trees were planted between autumn 2020 and spring 2022:

  • Enfield Chase Restoration: Led by the London Borough of Enfield and Thames21, restoring 60 hectares of woodland and improving 3 kilometres of walking and cycling routes.
  • Hainault Forest Extension: Led by the Woodland Trust in Havering, creating a wildlife corridor and enabling public access to previously private green space.

The Mayor also provided match funding to the Heritage Lottery Funded Great North Wood project, led by London Wildlife Trust.

Since 2017, we have awarded nearly £1.5 million to over 80 community projects, resulting in the planting of almost 100,000 trees. These projects are featured on our Greener City map. Find out more about:

Further community tree planting was supported through the Grow Back Greener Fund, with rounds in 2020 and 2021 and 2022.

Find out more about tree planting programmes before May 2016.