Cornwall Council has announced a plan to spend £30 million on planting thousands of new trees in a bid to tackle climate change.

The proposed forest plan, which would form part of the local authority’s climate change and carbon-neutral action plan, would create a 20,000-acre forest covering roughly 2% of the region’s land mass.

It would serve the purpose of increasing biodiversity and acting as a large-scale carbon sink to remove harmful greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere.

The council declared an official climate emergency at the start of 2019 and announced it would work to become entirely carbon neutral by 2030.

Trees would not only be planted in existing woodland areas but also in streets, hedgerows and new dedicated areas.

The council’s cabinet is expected to approve the action plan next week.

An area of forest twice the size of the UK has been cut down since 2010 to set up food plantations.