A report has called on ministers to scrap the huge subsidies and tax breaks given to conifer forests because they do too little to combat the climate crisis.
The report from the Royal Society of Edinburgh said the tens of millions of pounds in subsidies given to the timber industry should instead be spent on longer-living native forests, which have greater and clearer climate and biodiversity benefits.
It said the Scottish and UK governments are wrong to argue that public subsidies are needed to help plant more, larger conifer forests. These plantations are largely monocultures using a single species that have a relatively short lifespan.
Instead, public subsidies should be diverted to planting millions of native broadleaf trees, including in urban areas, which capture and keep more CO2, support more plant and animal species, store more carbon in the soil, and have a far longer lifespan.
I’ve seen these vast scale conifer forests and they are little more than neatly ordered lines of the same tree. There’s no diversity, no real undergrowth, nothing. They’re more like someone just copy-pasted the same set of trees over several square miles and then called it a day. Oddly depressing places, actually. Ultimately these are still better than nothing, but we can absolutely do better via reallocation of funding.
They’re actually not better than nothing, they monoculture spruce forests effectively prevent wildlife from coming back and the farming of it prevents biodiversity.
It’s like a field of corn as far as benefit for the environment is concerned. It’s a benefit for lumber interests though