Trees, Carbon Offsetting And The Loss Of Our Land
It would seem whether fighting in the name of the fatherland, the motherland or the homeland, that one word - land - has probably been at the back of every conflict since mankind could wield a club.
Land is a dear and precious thing and people everywhere instinctively see keeping control of their territory as key to their survival. Well, everywhere, it seems, except Scotland.
The blue and yellow flag Ukrainians proudly fight under is said to depict their farmed heritage and its landscape, and I read recently that the Ukrainian people have a great affinity for the soil and land, much of which comes from memories of the Holodomor, a famine that killed 3.5 million Ukrainians in the 1930s. This was a man-made famine which occurred within the breadbasket of Europe and was caused by the political doctrines of far off city-bound politicians who thought they knew best about how farming should be organised.
One of the most disturbing stories I've heard with regard to the effect of propoganda and media influence recalls relatives in Russia refusing to believe family members in Ukraine as to the extent of Putin’s 'special operation'. I imagine, though, that these people are not 'bad' people - just ones who choose to believe the official narrative.
Facts are paramount, but even in our world where free speech is taken for granted, facts sometimes get buried in mountains of information or are simply ignored by popular narratives, reinforced again and again in a media that instinctively knows it is good business to tell consumers what they want to hear.
I would contend “tree planting is good for the environment” is one such popular narrative that few in the media or corridors of power seem able to see past. Even bodies that should know better, like the National Farmers Union, fall into the trap of talk of “integrating farming and forestry”. Those concerned about the amount of land being lost to forestry in places like Galloway must stop talking of integration; and stop using the language of compromise. As a representative of RSPB put it so well, “all the forest industry wants is just a little bit more land, and after that, all they will want is just another little bit more land” and so on. They just keep chewing away at Scotland to try to satisfy the insatiable demand of their clientele, or the new breed of corporate investor trying to offset their business’ responsibilities (and guilt) for the harm they have done - and continue to do - to the planet.
It doesn’t matter if it is one of the few larger areas of open farmland so crucial for conserving hard-pressed ground nesting birds like the curlew - the supposed “panda of UK conservation” – or land backing directly onto the thousands of acres of the Galloway Forest Park; it just all gets ‘integrated’, ie covered in Sitka spruce.
Planting under current legislation is a one-way street whereby when land gets planted, it cannot come back out of trees for the foreseeable future. Environmental bodies like NatureScot and SEPA have been gagged and neutered by concordant agreements with Scottish Forestry that they have been forced to accept by an urban-bound government that ‘knows best’. And what does it know best? That at around 18%, Scotland’s forest cover is lower than the European average, and to them this lack of ‘being average’ is something that must be corrected by state doctrine.
Pictured is James with his sheep up on the hill with plantation forestry and wind turbines in the background.
At the recent Land Use conversation held at the CatStrand, in the spirit of ‘facts being paramount’ I thought I would put forward my view when the debate was opened to the floor. I stated that at eight million cubic metres of timber, Scotland was already producing well above the European average, but was cut short by a prominent forestry industry figure with the comment of “your figures are wrong”, who went on to quote a figure of six million metres cubed as being the ‘correct’ amount Scottish timber output.
Upon returning home I thought I would check out this point, and sure enough, for the five years pre-covid Scotland produced on average 8.55 million metres cubed. The person who had contradicted my figure works for one of the UK’s (Europe’s) biggest timber processors - this is someone who has the ear of press and politicians alike, yet it appears he doesn’t actually know the extent of Scotland’s timber resource. His figures - so freely given to a public meeting - under estimate Scottish annual timber supplies by 40-50%; a massive discrepancy.
To finish the point I was trying to make at the CatStrand event, Scotland has a land area of 7.8 million hectares and a population of five million and, despite much of the country being unsuitable for forestry (28.1% is high, windy, rocky mountain land like the Rhinns of Kells, that wont grow trees - so called forest land Class 7 - and a further 22% is naturally treeless peat-filled blanket bog), Scotland still produces around 8.5 million metres cubed of timber annually. By comparison, Europe as a whole has a land area of 620 million hectares (excluding Russia), has a population of 627 million and produces 542.5 million metres cubed of timber (State of Europe’s Forest Report 2020).
If you do the maths, Scotland by land area currently produces 25% above the European average, and by population (probably a more useful assessment of timber requirements) Scotland actually produces double the timber of the European average on this per capita basis - all in a country where more than half the land area is totally unsuitable for forestry. Further, according to the National Forest Inventory, Scotland timber production is set to soar to 12 million metres cubed by 2030. So in just eight years time Scotland will be producing around three times more timber than the European average on this per capita basis.
To add context, further consider that Europe (the UK included) is a net timber exporter (30 million metres cubed surplus) produced from a vast and growing timber resource felled at a very sustainable 73% of annual incremental forest growth. Further, Europe currently burns 112 million metres cubed of roundwood, and could burn more, such is its abundance. In addition to this, Europe burns tens of millions of tonnes of waste wood, all of which could be recycled into useful products like particleboard, but using this type of wood efficiently is simply not needed, such is the abundance of virgin timber.
All this is set in a world where roughly half of all timber produced annually is burned, the burning of which constituting around 4-5% of all anthropogenic warming (Jacobsen 2010) in soot effects alone. Note that this still excludes the global warming effect of all the emissions of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide also emitted at combustion.
As we’ve established, facts are paramount, so for those believing the idea that planting trees is a valid climate mitigation strategy, please consider the following: There have been very few actual measurements of soil carbon changes following afforestation of organo-mineral soils (shallow peat) in the UK uplands (Reynolds 2007). However, one such study by Edinburgh University researchers of a Sitka spruce forest at the Forestry Commission’s (FC) study site at Harwood Forest in Northumberland (on soils very similar to much of the Glenkens) recorded a massive 134 tonnes per hectare loss over the first 40 year rotation, which is a similar amount to the carbon accumulated in the trees.
This soil carbon loss throughout the rotation was then followed by a further additional large soil carbon loss at clearfell which was followed by a slow soil carbon recovery through the second rotation, reaching a balance 80 years after initial planting (Zerva and Mencuccini 2005). Other studies, also at the FC Harwood Forest site, have shown additional significant nitrous oxide warming emissions equivalent to 10% of the cooling effect of the growing trees (Ball et al 2003). In a very similar study, Benanti et al (2014) found the net effect of the land use change from wet grassland to Sitka spruce forest also reduced the assumed CO2 global warming amelioration capacity by 10% through the release of nitrous oxide.
This loss of soil carbon during the first Sitka rotation, followed by a gradual recovery during second rotation as recorded by Zerva and Mencuccini, is backed up by the Forest Research Study Venguelova (2018), and this loss and slow recovery in the second rotation appears to be the Forest Research official line on this point. However, given Scottish Government’s commitment to a ‘net zero’ date of 2045, the 50–60 years or so that this 134 tonnes soil carbon per hectare is lost to the atmosphere (and the global warming feedback effects it brings) needs to be carefully considered, in addition to several other global warming effects from afforestation such as the change in surface albedo (or reflectivity) that’s caused by the change in land cover from open ground to conifer forest.
In the briefing note, Morison (2019), written by James Morison, head of UK Forest Research (and a ‘go to’ advisor to the UK’s Climate Change Committee), the albedo effect is described as a “substantial component of the net climate change effect of afforestation” and the range of “25 to 45%” is offered as “the likely reduction in the cooling effect by the carbon stored in the trees by the warming effects of the albedo change caused by tree planting in the UK”. Therefore, even at its lowest value, this warming effect is the equivalent of the release into the atmosphere of 37.5 tonnes carbon per hectare in a typical Sitka forest situation.
Adding these afforestation warming effects of soil carbon loss, forest nitrous oxide emissions and albedo change effects together comes to an equivalent warming effect of over 180 tonnes of carbon per hectare by the year 2062 for a forest planted today.
Set this against 150 tonnes of carbon per hectare stored in the trees over the same time frame – though this carbon may also eventually be be released back into the atmosphere after harvesting by burning these trees as biomass fuel – in a Europe which currently has hundreds of millions of cubic metres of timber surpluses to our requirements, what else are we going to use it for? It should be noted all these figures come from either Forest Research/Forestry Commission or from research conducted at their study sites; if their research is correct, the planting of more forests in the Glenkens will in actual scientific fact impede, not help, Scotland reach its 2045 net zero target.
It may be hard to believe the figures could get any worse, but if trees from these local forests are burned as biomass - or it displaces trees elsewhere from their market that are then burned as biomass - the energy debt to transport, dry and process this wood for burning as a fuel is estimated by the Food and Agriculture Organisation and others to be around 25% of the total energy value. So even if biomass fuel is used instead of fossil fuel in this process, this means for every three hectares burned as biomass an additional hectare (with all its inherent 180 tonnes of carbon cost/debt) needs to be grown just to ‘fuel’ the whole process, meaning the potential effect isn’t of 180 tonnes of carbon being released by 2061 but the equivalent of 240 tonnes of carbon being released into the atmosphere for every hectare of biomass fuel delivered to the burner (which when burned loads another 130 tonnes or so of carbon per hectare into the atmosphere), ie 370 tonnes carbon from every hectare of Sitka harvested from the Glenkens come 2062.
Or convert that 370 tonnes carbon into CO2 equivalents - as Scotgov and the forest sector like to do in order to exaggerate the ‘benefits’ of forestry - and that comes to a release of 1,356 tonnes CO2 per hectare. This is what is actually happening according to the forest sector’s own research. How could this joke – this ‘pretendie’ carbon offset - ever help address climate change?
All this and, say, a long haul airline perhaps based in Australia boasting it is helping the environment in its purchase of carbon credits in Scotland (I’m told this is actually the case for land near Dumfries) while it continues to blast aviation fuel into the upper atmosphere on a daily basis. However, in reality, their supposed offset forest in Scotland is actually pumping another 1,356 tonnes CO2 per hectare into the atmosphere over its first 40 year rotation.
The current climate change mitigation strategy is built around tree planting that will see the destruction of farmland and upland bird habitats that’s already well under way (eg 5,000 breeding curlew pairs and many, many more lost from Galloway and Border hills alone - RSPB). It is a ‘strategy’ that will not only oversee rural depopulation and the end of a farming tradition and occupancy of the land that stretches back five or six thousands years, but will ‘help’ cause local extinction of birds such as curlews, plovers, skylarks and black grouse. It is a strategy for the loss of habitats, flora, fauna and people, all to be replaced by foreign-owned carbon-offset Sitka forests that don’t actually offset carbon or slow global warming at all, but actually contribute to it.
Finally, almost everyone I speak to seems to think to go against the popular narrative around tree planting - to go against Scotgov doctrines and to turn around its forestry bandwagon - is a nigh on an impossible task. However, if the current system is to be halted or even slowed down then the facts must be heard - and the Glenkens Gazette seems as good a place as any to start this much needed process!
James Ramsay