It may look tranquil, but rural Wales is in some turmoil. The government has ambitious tree-planting targets, and there are fears that private equity companies and landowners have started a feeding frenzy around a trough of tree-planting grants, woodland carbon units, pending issuance units and other complex forms of carbon-offset trading. Rural people see that their communities are under threat, and fear landscape change and land being taken out of traditional food production. Farmers may be torn between their loyalty to the community and offers for their farmland that they cannot resist. Conservationists and rewilders risk becoming targets for the kind of rural anger that undermined the ‘Summit to Sea’ rewilding project in West Wales recently. Welsh nationalists are likely to support local communities and want them to be involved and consulted. This is a potentially explosive and destructive situation where conservationists and farmers who could be working together may find themselves embittered opponents and both lose out as a result. There is a way through, though, and the model could be based on the Scottish Land Fund and the Community Right to Buy, that have enabled many Scottish communities to take control of their futures by acquiring their local landscapes. From the islands of the Hebrides to the moorlands of the Scottish southern uplands, communities that have historically been dominated by absentee landlords have acquired the land that surrounds them, and started to manage it for the good of the locals and of the planet. In Wales the need for communities to take control of their destinies is just as urgent.
In the village of Cwrt-y-Cadno in Carmarthenshire, one example of many, the community is protesting about the sale of a farm to an opaque private equity company called Foresight, based in the Channel Islands, who want to plant trees in order to trade in carbon offsetting. The villagers are not opposed to conservation, but they are not sure that this is what Foresight is planning. They fear that Foresight will plant inappropriate conifer plantations like the dense Forestry Commission monocultures found in much of Wales, while destroying hard-won and precious farmland. Such communities know that the circling investment companies will be driven solely by the profit motive. Many in the village see such small farms as precious resources at the heart of their communities, producing high quality local food. The company says it will not plant trees on the productive farmland, but the community does not believe them, knowing that it is easier and cheaper for these companies to plant on such land than on the hillsides.
Elsewhere in Wales farmers are under pressure from cold calls by estate agents making offers to buy their farms on behalf of investors. Their motives are likely to be either to profit from carbon trading to offset the emissions of other companies, or to directly offset their own emissions. They will not have any interest in the development of biodiversity in Wales, nor any concern for how Welsh communities can develop a biodiverse and sustainable environment that meets their social and employment needs. These companies are likely to be trying to greenwash industry at the expense of Welsh communities, and Wales needs to defend itself against them.
A major problem for companies wishing to plant trees in the Welsh uplands is that farms in these landscapes are often composed of owned land around the farm, together with the right to graze animals on the upland common grazings. These commons are owned by private landowners or by large estates such as the Beaufort Estate (for example), and sometimes by the Crown. Because the commoners’ rights limit what can be done by the landowners, no change of use can occur without the consent of the commoners. Many in Wales fear that the incentives of carbon trading are so powerful that the landowners will seek to overturn the common rights, as happened during the enclosure movement in much of the UK in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If the private equity companies were to acquire the commons, they would still not be able to plant trees there without the consent of the graziers. For trees to be planted in the most suitable places, such as heavily bracken-infested parts of the uplands, this impasse needs to be resolved in a way that prioritises the needs and feelings of the local Welsh communities.
In Scotland there is both a Community Land Fund and legislation giving Community Right to Buy, which allows communities to register an interest in land and the opportunity to buy that land when it comes up for sale. If appropriate legislation on this model were to be introduced in Wales, many of the current problems and tensions might be resolvable. Instead of being bought by anonymous and possibly offshore investment companies, the land could be bought by the community. They would then be able to decide where on that land to undertake ecosystem restoration, how to manage the farmland, and what sort of trees to plant. They could, as with the Langholm community buy-out in southern Scotland, develop projects to improve opportunities for young people in the village. The money from the tree planting grants and for the carbon credits would return to the local community who could use it for their own projects, instead of it being taken out of Wales and possibly the UK by offshore investors.
As for the common grazing land on the mountains, community buy-outs would result in common land-use rights staying in the community. This could be the start of a process whereby the commoners and the common owner could agree to use all or part of the common for tree planting. Areas infested with bracken would make ideal woodland sites and this could leave other areas of the commons available for those who wished to graze them. Income from carbon offsetting could be shared among the stakeholders and remain in the local community, and graziers, conservationists and the community would all benefit.
Carbon offsetting is a highly suspect world where companies can continue to pollute with greenhouse gasses if they offset this by tree planting and other schemes. It is vulnerable to fraud and deception, can result in what is called ‘carbon colonialism’ when it exploits third-world communities, and encourages companies to delay investing in carbon-neutral technology. It is entirely unacceptable to plant trees instead of cutting carbon emissions, when we know we should be doing both as fast as possible.. But as it is already happening in places like Wales, it would be better if the profits went to local communities and to local conservation organisations than to shadowy offshore financial speculators.
A very deep and insightful piece Richard, as we keep seeing it is the moneyed vested interests that have the ability to skew the world for everyone else - human and nature. Localism is truly the way forward?