Great Western Community Forest
The Great Western Community Forest (GWCF) was founded in 1994 alongside eleven other community forests across England, where local people and organisations are working together to create a better environment.
Unlike traditional forests, community forests aren't geographically restricted to one place. Instead, they are spread across a mix of community woodland, private woodland, on-street, urban woodland, wooded habitat corridors and hedgerows.
Aims of the project

By growing trees where they are most needed, corridors of woodlands will be created across the borough to better connect communities to nature.
This will help people enjoy the benefits of being close to trees and woodlands, enhance biodiversity and provide resilience to help reduce the effects of climate change on local communities through carbon capture, and nature-based solutions, mitigating flooding and drought.
With the town of Swindon at its heart, GWCF covers an area of 39,000 hectares (over 168 square miles) stretching from the North Wessex Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty to the River Thames.
The GWCF aims to create a network of woodlands and associated semi-natural habitats in response to local development pressures. In Swindon, there is a target of 30% tree cover across the GWCF area which includes the whole area of the borough, when Swindon’s average baseline tree cover was 3%.
Large areas of woodland have been planted in and around Swindon and approximately 60,000 trees have been planted to date.
See also: