A good balanced piece on one of England’s finest productive forests producing timber for multiple uses while simultaneously promoting biodiversity & delivering continual environmental improvements https://t.co/PBBqNKSlYC @TimberDevUK@CEIBois@forestsandwood@ForestryComm
The Landscape Institute has published the results of research revealing that the £25bn landscape sector faces critical skills shortages and a fragile talent pipeline. Read the full findings here: https://t.co/3d8gGMVUsK
A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it.
Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at.
Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets.
That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting.
This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid.
So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram.
The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck.
And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.
@DrNeilStone These spaces provide a sense of normality, hope and humanity at some of the most challenging moments in people's. It is a reminder that healthcare is not just about buildings and treatments, but about creating environments that support healing in its broadest sense
@DrNeilStone For patients in intensive care, who may spend long periods isolated from the outside world, even a brief connection with fresh air, sunlight, plants and seasonal change can be profoundly important.
This is about a thousand more people than died in the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, yet hardly a mention in news bulletins. Extreme heat is becoming so frequent to the point where it’s no longer noteworthy, while some say we should slow down on emissions reductions…
Decisions on housing and infrastructure impact the wellbeing of future generations. Help us make the case for nature-positive housing and infrastructure to drive economic growth, resilience and better places by sharing your work.
Find out more ➡️ https://t.co/ZBbQx19W7z
💧🌳 It’s #WateringWednesday and it’s never mattered more.
With record-breaking May heat, young street trees are under real stress and need our help to survive.
Join people across the country caring for baby urban trees - one watering can at a time.
#Heatwave#ClimateAction
@giveashitnature It’s absolutely beautiful — such a naturalistic and uplifting scheme. What a remarkable legacy the late Professor Nigel Dunnett has left through his vision for biodiverse, climate-resilient planting.
Angry doesn’t even begin to cover it..
Today at Snettisham beach protected area for ground nesting birds including Little Ringed Plover, Oystercatcher, Ringed Plover…...
Signage EVERYWHERE asking for dogs on leads.
📸 Derek Bromage - Snettisham Village Facebook Page.