“Nature is in trouble in Scotland. We are one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth with one in nine of our species threatened with extinction.”
So began a foreword to the Woodland Trust’s Nature Recovery Report, launched at the Scottish Parliament in May, where Director Alistair Seaman laid the status of Scottish conservation and regeneration efforts bare.
The study reflected one of the areas that has received some of the closest scrutiny in recent years: the status of Scotland’s forests.
In April of this year, the Scottish Government – who until then had some of the world’s most ambitious climate pledges – officially reneged on their net-zero by 2030 target.
That is only the latest in a series of controversial developments that have raised questions about commitments to conservation.
Cuts to forestry:
Last July, the government published its annual survey of public attitudes to forestry. The study said that, “Around four fifths (81%) of respondents believed that there was at least one benefit from forestry worth supporting with public money.”
Despite this – as there has been to perhaps more detrimental effect elsewhere – spending cuts have decimated regeneration budgets.
In the Scottish Government’s latest budget in December last year, Scottish forestry’s woodland creation budget was slashed by 41%, falling from £77.2m to £45.4m.
A spokesperson for Scottish Forestry – the Scottish Government agency responsible for forestry policy, support and regulations – maintained their view of the importance of forests for Scotland:
“Scotland’s forests and woodlands are very important in that they contribute to tackling climate change and nature loss.
“Over 7 million tonnes of harmful CO2 are sequestered through our forests every year – that’s about 14% of Scotland’s gross emissions. Our woodlands provide many different habitats and support over 72 different species of wildlife, many iconic to Scotland.”
According to the spokesperson for Scottish Forestry, “Every woodland scheme that is proposed is put to Scottish Forestry who assess it against industry best practice standards and environmental regulations.
“The goal is to get the right tree in the right place and we strive for a mixture of woodland – both productive conifers and broadleaves.”
Scottish forests through the centuries:
Mounting failures:
The Scottish Government has failed to meet its forestry planting target every year for the past five years.
“Scotland has very ambitious tree planting targets in place, however, we have not been able to meet these over recent years,” admitted a spokesperson for Scottish Forestry.
“This has been partly due to Brexit, Covid and one of the worst storm years for a decade where millions of trees came down and the industry had to divert attention from planting to tidying up and dealing with the aftermath.
“There is also a skills and capacity issue affecting many sectors, including forestry, which has had an effect.”
The ripple effect of these phenomena indicates just how wrapped up forest regeneration efforts are with the ebbing and flowing of economic headwinds.
As one of the leading symbols of Scotland’s regeneration movement, with questions around Scotland’s forests becoming louder, other questions have begun to emerge.
And they generally revolve around a primary subject – how tied up in the economy are Scottish forests?
The Scottish Forestry Grant Scheme:
Scottish Forestry gives the following definition:
“The Forestry Grant Scheme (FGS) offers financial support for the creation of new woodland and the sustainable management of existing woodland.”
Scottish Forestry says that the grant scheme “is a key driver in stimulating woodland expansion.”
Since 2015 it is responsible for establishing over 80,000 hectares of woodland in Scotland – around 160 million trees.
“The scheme is constantly being developed and last year saw the largest fundamental change to it since 2015. We have also carried out a full consultation on the future of forestry grant support for the future so that it better delivers for Net Zero, biodiversity and for communities.”
However, recent developments have highlighted the issues facing the scheme.
In April of this year, blogger and activist Nick Kempe found that at a site operated by BrewDog – who received £690,000 as part of the native woodland creation grant in order to plant the aptly-named Lost Forest.
Scottish Forestry has assured that this kind of event is under tight control and is subject to repercussions.
A spokesperson for the body said: “There are checks and balances in place to ensure that the woodland creation that is agreed actually takes place.
“If a landowner (as in BrewDog, for example) does not fulfil the conditions of the grant scheme contract then we can reclaim the money – in this way the public purse is fully protected.”
Posting on LinkedIn shortly after the story broke, BrewDog’s CEO James Watt addressed the situation:
“We have done a full assessment with Scottish Woodlands Ltd and two weeks ago we began replanting the failed saplings in earnest and we have already replaced 50,000 of the baby trees that did not survive the winter.”
But BrewDog’s planting strategy at its Lost Forest at Kinrara was just one small portion of a nation filled with forests whose regeneration is funded by the Scottish Forestry Grant Scheme, and serves to illustrate some the most significant problems facing the movement to regenerate Scotland’s forests.
While they’ve been required to restart the project and to give back the funds that were behind the failed plantation, there seems to be behind all this a distinct lack of real scrutiny.
And the negligence that might have ruined a huge tract of land that is a popular walking spot as well as a potential carbon sink is not confined to the estate at Kinrara.
What is the problem with the Forestry Grant Scheme?
According to Mr Kempe: “We have one of the least areas of native woodland of any country in Europe. So [the native woodland grant] was a good thing with good intentions. However, it’s gone pretty wrong.”
There are a number of concerns about the scheme, in particular, that the techniques and trees used at these plantations is having a major ecological impact.
One of the proposed reasons for this is the increasing predominance of Scotland’s most commonly planted conifer tree, the Sitka spruce, a tree that is said by NatureScot to be an “invasive” species that “negatively” impacts its environment.
Mr. Kempe summarises the issue at play: “It’s safer for people wanting to get grants to plant trees and put them in polluting plastic tubes so you help them survive for the first five years.”
Then, there is the fundamental question of oversight on these projects.
Taking Brewdog’s Lost Forest as an example, Mr. Kempe says that bodies that are in place to regulate planting strategies and the rollout of schemes.
He said: “They’re not concerned because the first regards it’s the trees died, the landowner just has the state shown very little concern about what actually whether planting that works or not, because all we’re bothered about is their targets, not whether what happens is good for nature or good for carbon.
“So I think the failure from Scottish Forestry is immense. And there’s very, very little transparent information published about it.”
According to some, the reasons behind the particular issue of poorly run and monitored forestry subsidies may be connected with a larger problem.
“There is a serious issue about transparency and land ownership,” Mr Kempe says.
“But I would say equally important is there’s just a lack of basic controls about how land is best used in the national interest.”
Mr Kempe is far from alone in seeing connections between the failure of particular sites and general management of Scottish land.
In a wide-ranging analysis published earlier this year, The Ferret underlined a substantial history of rural-grant rule-breaking among some of Scotland’s wealthiest landowners.
Are Scottish Forests in a democracy crisis?
2014 was a year of sweeping democratic responsibility in Scotland – the referendum drew the votes of 84.59% of the electorate.
It was also the year that a landmark government study questioned the foundation and transparency of the same democracy.
Ten years ago, The Land Reform Review Group – an independent review group established by the Scottish Government in 2012 – published a report on the share of ownership in Scottish forests that said:
“It is claimed that currently 432 private landowners own 50% of the private land in rural Scotland. The latest estimate of Scotland’s population is 5,327,000, so this means that half of a fundamental resource for the country is owned by 0.008% of the population.
“As a measure of inequality in a modern democracy, this is exceptional and is in need of explanation.”
While this issue is perhaps only tangentially related to the specifics of a grant scheme, it does seem to underscore a fundamental imbalance at the core of Scottish land management.
“I think it’s simple,” Mr. Kempe said, “all we have to do is good research to show that when they’re reduced to two kilometres or two per square kilometre or less natural regeneration of vegetation and woodland happen, what that means trees will grow where trees will grow.
He looks at more successful forestry policies on the European mainland, and laments the things that forestry policy in Scotland is failing to address through unsustainable techniques:
“We plant lots of trees close together within fences, and then basically ignore them for 10 years, and then someone comes back and might do something, and then they come back again and the whole thing produces no local jobs.
“No one cares about the area. It basically has almost no environmental or social benefits whatsoever.”
The prospective benefits of quality research go further, according to an ‘Inquiry into public financial support for tree planting and forestry’ published by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in February:
“Production forestry species such as Sitka spruce grow quickly and take up carbon more rapidly than native broadleaved species (Matthews et al.,2022), although natural forests ultimately store more carbon than plantations (Waring et al., 2020) and they also provide more co-benefits for water provisioning, soil erosion control and biodiversity (Hua et al., 2022; see also section 8, Biodiversity).”
The RSE also recognises the benefits that sustainably managed soils offer:
“Globally, soils contain three times more carbon than does vegetation (Smith, 2004). On long-established woodlands, the soil can contain as much carbon as the trees, and on peaty soils the carbon in the soils can far exceed the amount of carbon in the trees (Matthews et al., 2020).
“This means that soils need to be carefully considered when planting trees, requiring a pre-planting survey at a fine enough grain across the whole site to understand the soil types and their locations.”
Hope springs:
In all of the complexity and numbers games of the status of Scotland’s forests, there is in some quarters, the confidence that progress is still being made when it comes to regenerating the natural environment in Scotland.
Certainly, the Scottish Government is inclined to think so, as a spokesperson for Scottish Forestry says:
“Scotland is still producing the lion’s share of all the new planting in the UK – around 65% of it and whatever we plant this year is still likely to be more than the rest of the UK combined.”
Fundamentally, however, targets are being missed. With high-profile grant schemes failing, mounting challenges might make it difficult to grasp if healthy forestry and land in Scotland are worth protecting.
Mr. Kempe maintains that there are extremely strong reasons for working to adapt forestry policy to natural demands: “it’s very, very difficult to predict by what nature would do. I mean, that’s the great thing about nature, you can’t predict it.
“But I think what we can take is that there will be more woodland in the upland areas, than there is at present. Woodland will regenerate.
“There’s lots of great estates, I mentioned Cairngorms Connect, and so on. Lots of good examples. And woodland regenerates by itself.
“I think from a position of people’s experience of the woodland, and we would probably have much more much more wildlife, and a more varied wildlife.”
