This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

The UK Climate Change Committee’s seventh carbon budget report, published last month advised that tree planting rates across the UK must more than double to 37,000 hectares per year by 2030.

Scotland is expected to do a lot of that heavy lifting. But, Scotland is well off course.

This week I teamed up with The Herald news and business writer, Brian Donnelly, to create a series that looks at the issues and controversies around our tree planting targets - from questions of greenwashing, failed schemes and ecological damage through to timber shortages and the climate of uncertainty for industry.

There is a battle going on over Scotland’s forestry. Two stories dominate. One has it that planting trees, and in particular fast-growing softwood trees like non-native sitka spruce, provides a means of carbon capture necessary to meet net zero targets in the mid part of this century, whilst also providing wood in a country, the UK, which is currently the second biggest importer of wood in the world - and is also set in two decades time to see a decline in production.

To understand part of this story, I visited the James Jones & Sons sawmill in Lockerbie, where spruce is processed to........

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