Autumn message to Woodland Trust members

I'm here at Ferry Meadows and it's a great place to experience autumn.

It's got otters, it's got kingfishers, it's got herons, all making great use of the lake. But it also has those mature, life-giving trees across the site and it's a fabulous resource for the people of Peterborough.

We now have a huge body of evidence that shows that having trees in our lives is not only making the place richer and nicer, but they do some really important, serious stuff for us.

In the current edition of Broadleaf, you'll see just what some of those serious things are. And with 85% of the UK population living in urban areas, we need to put those benefits where people live.

As well as being beautiful, the trees of our neighbourhoods also help to lower air pollution, helping to deal with chronic respiratory issues like asthma.

But they also help with something called the island heat effect, where in our urban areas, due to the concrete infrastructure, the buildings and the way in which traffic releases heat rather than absorbing it, means that our urban areas are often hotter than our rural areas.

Trees play a fundamental role in helping us to absorb that heat and make our urban areas cooler as a result. Most of us know how unwell we can feel when exposed to excessive heat. And those dangers are only getting greater as we see our summers getting hotter.

Trees play an important role through delivery of shade, but also they help to protect us from other extreme weather events like flash flooding. So, those tree-lined streets that we have in our urban areas become really important for both people's health and we also know they help to increase the value of your home.

So, we've teamed up with the likes of Keep Wales Tidy, the Clyde Climate Forest and Trees for Cities in order to bring more trees to where people live and where they're needed most.

That means there's going to be more than half a million new trees going out into those communities and providing the benefits that we want them to see.

We're also connecting inner city communities and school children with green space - places like this at Ferry Meadows - so that they can be shown the benefits of getting out into green space and having the benefits of trees without actually having just to simply tell them about it. And in doing so, they can benefit like we all can.

There's more on all of this in the new autumn edition of Broadleaf, as well as some hopeful scientific news with regard to ash dieback, for which we've got our fingers crossed, as well as the opportunity to read about the fascinating but stunted growing trees of our Scottish mountains. All of our work is only possible because of the support that you give us. So, I hope you have a wonderful autumn and thank you for your support.