Just under 16 million trees have been cut down on publicly owned Scottish land to make way for wind farms. Conservation campaigners warn that planning regulations for new turbines on wild land are so relaxed they are difficult not to meet.
Mairi Gougeon, the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) Rural Affairs Secretary, last month estimated that 15.7 million trees had been felled since 2000 on land managed by the Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) agency. That equates to more than 1,700 a day.
