Councils balancing tree protection, legal liability and shrinking budgets are on the front line of climate risk. Sarah Dodd, a local government lawyer specialising in tree law, highlights the missing piece in insurers’ approach: the unseen carbon consequences of claims decisions.

Local government is where climate ambition meets the everyday reality of risk. Councils are expected to protect trees, reduce emissions, and manage rising subsidence claims, often with shrinking budgets and limited room for error. On paper, insurers have made progress on Scope Three reporting. In practice, one part of the carbon story is still missing. The emissions created by claims decisions themselves are rarely acknowledged, even though they shape outcomes on the ground.

Tree-related subsidence makes that gap visible. As hotter, drier summers become more common, claim volumes rise and long-standing assumptions are put under strain. Yet many of the frameworks guiding decisions were developed for a different climate. When pressure builds, the system defaults to what feels safest, not what is necessarily most proportionate or sustainable.

For councils, subsidence linked to trees tends to fall into two distinct categories, each with its own pressures.

The first involves council-owned street trees. When evidence links a street tree to subsidence damage, councils are asked to act. This often sits uneasily alongside public commitments to retain and expand much loved trees and an environmentally important urban canopy. Officers must weigh legal exposure, public perception, and operational capacity, all while knowing their own insurers are focused on reducing future claims and want them to take action. In that context, removal or heavy pruning can feel like the most defensible option – and less risky. Because if the council decides not to act and a legal claim follows, liability is typically insured. That backstop does not dictate decisions outright, but it does shape the boundaries of what feels acceptable.

Then there’s a second scenario; one that is more exposed and less openly discussed. Trees protected by a tree preservation order are often privately owned, yet at the same time councils must approve or refuse any proposed works. When a TPO tree is implicated in subsidence, refusal carries a specific financial risk. Homeowners can seek compensation for additional costs incurred as a result of the refusal, often linked to underpinning or other engineering solutions.

The crucial fact here is councils have no insurance cover for this liability. Any compensation awarded comes directly from local authority budgets – and we all know how stretched they are. That creates a quiet but powerful incentive. Faced with the prospect of defending an uninsured claim, councils may approve works to trees they have formally recognised as valuable, historic, or culturally significant. These are the cases that frequently draw public opposition and national media attention, as communities question how protected trees can still be lost.

Legally, all of this is framed around the concept of reasonableness – which is more amorphous than it is set in stone. Councils are required to balance responsible tree management with proportionate action to prevent damage. But what counts as reasonable is shaped by what can be measured and defended. Legal risk is quantified. Cost is visible. Carbon, by contrast, sits largely outside the decision-making frame.

That absence matters. It quietly nudges outcomes in a particular direction. Tree removal becomes the default not because it is always the best solution, but because alternatives feel harder to justify within existing processes. Techniques such as resin injection, root management, or targeted underpinning are often seen as uncertain or risky, even where evidence suggests they may be effective in the right conditions. The challenge is not a lack of options, but a lack of confidence in comparing them.

This is where data matters and a carbon calculator changes the dynamic. It does not replace legal or technical judgement, but it adds a missing layer of transparency. By showing the carbon footprint of tree removal alongside lower-impact alternatives, it makes trade-offs explicit rather than implicit at the same time as giving officers something concrete to reference when explaining why a particular route was chosen, both internally and in the public eye.

For councils caught between climate commitments and legal exposure, that level of visibility matters. It helps decisions feel less defensive and more balanced. For insurers, it raises a necessary question about how climate responsibility is defined. If emissions from claims handling are excluded from the picture, progress on reporting risks becomes merely cosmetic and performative.

As subsidence claims increase in parts of the UK and scrutiny intensifies, the gap between stated climate goals and operational reality will become harder to ignore. Councils will continue to make difficult choices under pressure. Insurers will continue to prioritise defensibility. Without better visibility of the carbon consequences embedded in those choices, the same patterns will repeat. Bringing carbon into the open does not make decisions easy, but it makes them more honest. And in local government, honesty is often the first step towards credibility.