HS Environment | The working group presents such additional costs for construction and field clearing

Five thousand EUR per hectare. That's how big the mandatory fee could be if you clear a forest to make way for a field, a building, a cottage road, a power line, a mine or any other project.

The amount in question has been arrived at by a working group whose task was to plan a new land use change fee and evaluate its effects. The working group gave up his final report for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and the Ministry of the Environment this week.

For example, a data center or a logistics center may need a space of 15–45 hectares. In this case, the additional payment would be 75,000–225,000 euros if this much forest was cleared in the way of the project.

Petteri Orpon (kok) the government program states that the effects of the introduction of the land use change fee will be evaluated. However, the government has not outlined anything about the introduction of the payment.

The purpose of the fee is to prevent deforestation, preserve carbon sinks in forests and reduce climate emissions. In previous years, deforestation has caused about six percent of Finland's climate emissions.

The land use change fee would not be collected from the town plan areas. The change fee would also not be charged for small areas of less than half a hectare. This way, for example, individual detached house construction sites or corrections of the corners of field blocks would be excluded from the payment.

Numerically, a third of field clearings fall below the half-hectare limit, meaning no fee would be charged for them.

Land use according to the working group's proposal, the change fee would be the same for everyone, regardless of whether the forest was cleared to make way for renewable energy, other construction or farming.

The fee would also not be tiered depending on whether the forest to be destroyed grows on peatlands or on hard land. This is despite the fact that emissions from deforestation on peat soils are more than ten times higher than on mineral soils.

Compared to the emissions from deforestation, the 5,000 euro per hectare fee is reasonable. It has been calculated based on both moderate emission rights prices and the lowest emissions.

If the payment were to take into account the current emission rights prices and the actual emissions from the clearing of bog forests, the payment should be in the order of ten tons on mineral lands and 50,000 euros per hectare on peat lands.

Work group however, he estimates that even a payment of 5,000 euros would prevent deforestation and reduce emissions significantly in agriculture. According to one survey, even an additional payment of 1,000 euros would curb farmers' desire to clear fields.

The land use change fee, on the other hand, would have little effect on the placement of construction projects. In construction projects, the additional cost would often be negligible, while in field clearing it would be significant. There is often no other location option for construction projects either.

On average, new cleared areas have been less than five hectares. For an average raivio, the change fee would therefore be around 20,000 euros.

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The clearing of a new field could be reduced.

New less than 4,000 hectares of fields have been cleared in Finland each year. The reason is usually animal production: additional area is needed for manure spreading and fodder production.

Clearing is often cheaper than buying a field. On average, the purchased field costs about 9,000 euros per hectare.

The proposed land use change fee of 5,000 euros would make buying a field cheaper than clearing a new field all over Finland. The price of arable land could rise locally in areas where there is a shortage of arable land.

According to the final report of the working group, the clearing of a new field could be reduced by 60–70 percent compared to the current pace.

Targeting the effects on fields is good in the sense that field clearing is responsible for about half of the climate emissions caused by deforestation, while construction accounts for about a fifth.

In total, the change fee could achieve emission reductions of 0.7–0.9 million tons of carbon dioxide. The amount is significant, as it would reduce the emissions caused by deforestation by as much as a fifth or a quarter. In Finland's total emissions, the reduction would be in the order of one to two percent.

Change fee would hardly affect, for example, the placement of wind turbines. One style power plant with tea takes up about three hectares. For example, an additional cost of 15,000 euros would not affect the location of the power plant, but perhaps the maintenance roads and connection lines required by it would be planned more sparingly from the perspective of the forest.

Instead, the payment would probably affect the placement of solar power plants, as the areas they require are large.

The largest solar power plants planned for Finland require space of 800–1,500 hectares. If you consider that about half of this would require clearing the forest, the price tag would be millions of euros. It would direct solar power plants away from forests, for example onto fallow and fallow land, fields, peat bogs or already built-up areas.

The government program promises to steer the production of solar electricity away from forests and fields.

A large solar power plant is planned in Harjunpää, Ulvila, mainly in the forest and to a lesser extent also in the field. Picture: Rio Gandara / HS

The fee would probably not affect the construction of large power lines, as the additional cost would be easily passed on to customers through electricity transmission pricing. Instead, the additional fee could take the design of smaller connection lines in a more forest-saving direction.

Land acquisition areas or the mines would not be located elsewhere, but at least the payment could encourage planning the projects to destroy the forest as little as possible.

Large road and railway projects would not be affected by the payment, because it would be drowned in million dollar budgets.

For example, if you take, for example, the improvement of highway 3 between Lempäälä and Pirkkala, there is about ten kilometers of new highway alignment, on which road about 90 hectares of forest should be cleared.

Although the change fee of 450,000 euros sounds like a lot, it would not be more than a tenth of a percent in a 190 million euro project.

On the other hand, in the construction of new private roads, for example, the fee would be a significant additional expense.

The payment would be beneficial for forestry and the wood processing industry, as more forests would remain to be felled. On the other hand, building new forest roads would be more expensive.

All in all, the impacts would be greater in the countryside, because there are more large-scale projects located in the forest.

Land use the reason behind the change fee is the ten-year shrinking of forest sinks in Finland and the shift of land use from a carbon sink to a source of emissions.

Finland would be forced to improve forest sinks due to both EU and national climate policy. The strengthening of sinks is also mentioned in the Climate Act.

According to the working group, a reduction in field clearing would be an effective climate measure precisely in terms of emissions from land use.

According to the government program, the government does not make decisions that increase the costs of agriculture.

According to the working group, the payment does not directly increase the costs of agriculture, because the payment can be avoided by not clearing the land.