The number of trees planted and awards granted in BrewDog's The Lost Forest: EIR release

Information requested

Please may you provide me with: How many of the trees that were planted in BrewDog's The Lost Forest at the Kinara estate have survived. I would also like to know the breakdown on what percentage of tree species have survived, along with how much grant money has been issued for the project.

Response

As the information you have requested is ‘environmental information’ for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with your request under those Regulations. We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with your request under FOISA.

This exemption is subject to the ‘public interest test’. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. We have found that, onbalance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption, because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes. This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

How many of the trees that were planted in BrewDog's The Lost Forest at the Kinara estate have survived.

Scottish Forestry carried out a maintenance inspection on 07/09/2023 which found significant deaths had occurred in planted trees (see attached inspection report). The loss of a proportion of planted trees is not uncommon and it is a requirement for the forestry agent to replace lost trees and our visits to the site indicate that this has taken place.

I would also like to know the breakdown on what percentage of tree species have survived, along with how much grant money has been issued for the project.

We do not have a breakdown of the percentage of tree species that survived but visits indicate that the replaced trees are growing well. The table below shows the grants awarded and paid to date.

FGS contract reference	Grant approved	Grant paid to date
21FGS62745 Lost Forest 1	£ 1,224,952.00	£881,565.16
23FGS70793 Lost Forest 2	£ 1,456,266.58	£225,855.72
23FGS73673 Lost Forest 2 NLD	£ 10506.60	£0
23FGS73674 Lost Forest 2 NLD	£ 10401.30	£0
23FGS73675 Lost Forest 2 NLD	£ 11700.00	£0
23FGS73676 Lost Forest 2 NLD	£ 7312.50	£0
Totals	£2,721,138.98	£1,107,420.88

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The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

EIR 202500456471 - Information Released - Annex

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