Cambridge City Council will be joining Trees for Streets, a new government-funded street tree sponsorship scheme. The initiative aims to support the planting of more than a quarter of a million trees on streets across the UK in the next decade by raising public donations to supplement current council tree planting budgets. 

Trees for Streets is a project by the national charity Trees for Cities and is funded by the government’s Green Recovery Challenge Fund. The scheme will use an online platform to allow Cambridge residents to sponsor the planting of a tree in their neighbourhood. These requests can be submitted to the Council and, if approved, the tree will be planted the following winter.

Cambridge is one of the first local authorities in the UK to sign up to the programme, which Councillor Alex Collis says will be an “exciting development” for the city. 

Collis, the Executive Councillor for Open Spaces, Sustainable Food and Community Wellbeing, continued: “We’re taking a holistic view of the whole city - while there are some areas of Cambridge that are leafy and offer lots of green space, there are still plenty where we want to increase the tree cover, so every tree counts in expanding our urban forest.”

The Trees for Streets campaign aims to improve the local population’s mental and physical health with easily accessible green space. It also intends to tackle air pollution in congested urban areas and bring local communities together in sponsoring and caring for their neighbourhood trees. 

Simeon Linstead, Project Director of Trees for Streets said that the scheme “enables residents to work with their local councils to make a difference to the world immediately on their doorstep.” 

Linstead continued that: “It’s really exciting to have Cambridge on board. They really understand the power of sponsorship to raise additional funding to support the planting of more trees. This is all about communities and councils working together more closely.”This new sponsorship scheme organised by Trees for Streets will also complement the ongoing work of the council’s Cambridge Canopy Project, which planted 500 new trees around the city in 2019/20.