The charity will put the idea to members at its annual general meeting in early November.
‘Our trees and hedges and environment generally lack any real protection,’ said committee member Colin Dodd. ‘The only protection that trees really have is if you take a tree protection order out on them.’
He said there had been an increase in pre-development clearance, where a wooded site was stripped of trees and hedges a couple of months before an application was submitted.
‘On the application it says will any trees or environmental damage be done in this process, and of course they’ve already done it, so they can tick the box and say no.’
Mr Dodd said a campaign would need some financial backing and there was no guarantee of success, ‘but I think for the sake of Guernsey’s environment, it’d be a good thing to do’.
His comments came after Storm Austen brought down a number of trees, although the damage was nowhere near that caused by Storm Goretti in January.
‘This storm was not quite as powerful and seems to have been relatively kind to us,’ he said.
Mr Dodd said storms were one of several threats to the island’s native trees. The island lost its elms to Dutch elm disease in the 1990s and now faces ash dieback, along with several other diseases brought in, generally by accident, from outside the island.
‘There is this continual erosion of our native trees and what we’re trying to do is just replace, really,’ he said.
The charity set up a Storm Goretti Fund after the January storm. Mr Dodd said it had raised ‘quite a large sum’ and the charity was thinking strategically about how best to use it, alongside its normal tree planting.
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