The impact of investment forestry on the land market, and the knock-on impacts for community ownership and community forestry, as well as the potentially damaging impacts on forest management
The fiscal advantages of land ownership and the largely unregulated land market facilitate speculation and are long term obstacles to community wealth building and sustainable economics. Accessing land to deliver projects for community sustainability has always been a challenge; rising prices and the restricted supply of forest land are further barriers to the ambitions of communities. The significant uplift in the price of forestry land in recent years was due to a combination of better timber prices (now and anticipated in the future), expectation of future windfalls (from measures to tackle climate change and biodiversity crises), with local factors such as low interest rates contributing to a brief but severe spike in 2021-22. Prices have fallen back since, but not to pre2020 levels, nor is there any expectation that this will happen.
These factors have been exacerbated by Scottish Government actions:
• A reluctance to tackle emissions at point of consumption and refusal to facilitate a systematic and measured land use transition;
• A reliance on developing and facilitating new mechanisms to incentivise land-use change which have been introduced alongside, rather than replacing, existing fiscal measures which support the status quo;
• A belief that large scale, extractive private investment is essential to deliver woodland creation and peatland restoration, which has encouraged the entry of new investors into an already crowded land market, all chasing an increasingly constrained supply of land.
Unfortunately, the current mix of incentives and mechanisms does little to promote active management of existing woods or the creation of the mixed multipurpose forests that would be useful for the communities of the future. The focus on area targets and the absence of measures to drive land release constrain afforestation to marginal ground and perpetuate the dominance of poor-quality plantations – of both conifers and native broadleaves – which do not deliver multiple benefits and do little to tackle the climate crisis.