A £12-million Scottish estate with a carbon project has been unexpectedly put up to sale amid criticisms of greenwashing.
Abrdn Property Income Trust Limited, which owns the 3,668-acre Far Ralia estate in the Cairngorms National Park, said the property has come to market following the trust’s decision to enter a managed wind-down and divest of all its assets.
Far Ralia has an approved reforestation scheme that has received over £2.5 mln in government funding and is estimated to sequester 346,000 tonnes of CO2 over its lifetime. It has so far planted 1.2 mln native trees, such as Scots pine, birch, oak, rowan, and aspen, and has an additional 200 hectares of damaged peatland to restore.
“For investors seeking to align profits with sustainability, Far Ralia represents a rare and compelling opportunity for investors to acquire a vast natural asset that can deliver both environmental and financial prospects,” said Will Matthews, head of farms and estates at Knight Frank, the property consultancy marketing the estate.
The trust engaged biodiversity specialists from the Natural History Museum to assess the project’s ecological benefits. According to the museum’s team, Far Ralia’s Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) is projected to rise from the current 51% to 94% over the next 75 years—a claim that land reform advocates with Parkswatch Scotland criticised as simplistic and lacking in evidence.
The campaigners argued that the BII calculations are flawed due to errors in baseline data and unrealistic assumptions about land-use categories remaining unchanged until 2097.
They also said that the NHM’s assessment was based on a “desktop exercise” without any on-site surveys, raising questions about its accuracy and relevance. Additionally, critics said that natural regeneration processes and passive abandonment could also lead to biodiversity recovery, which the report fails to adequately consider.
By Dimana Doneva – dimana@carbon-pulse.com
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