More than 300 hectares of forest have been cleared for a Google data centre in northern Finland without the environmental assessment the country’s regulator said it needed, with satellite images showing the felling ran on until August after the regulator’s letter in May. That is according to Sari Myllyoja, the unit head running the inquiry at Finland’s Licensing and Supervisory Authority, who said on Monday it looked as though Google’s project company had gone ahead regardless.
“Either this is gross incompetence from Google’s Finnish project company, Tuike Finland Oy, or gross disregard for Finnish legislation, or at worst both,” Hanna Halmeenpää, chair of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, said a fortnight ago. Satellite images have since shown that four nature sites set aside in the local plan were bulldozed as well, she said on Tuesday, and the association cannot recall a comparable case in its 86 years.
It comes after Google’s Finnish subsidiary asked the regulator in April to rule that no assessment was needed, so the permits for its investment could be issued without waiting for one. The regulator answered in May that the assessment had to run as normal, since the law requires one before any permanent clearing above 200 hectares, and the harvesting that started in March continued anyway.
“Trees have been felled on Google-owned land in Muhos and Kajaani in full compliance with the requirements of the Forest Act,” Michiel Sallaets, Google’s communications manager, said in a statement that also cited nature surveys across the whole site. Tuike Finland has told the regulator it checked the law before work began and found its approach lawful under both the Forest Act and the Building Act, with Muhos building control confirming in June that work could start.
“Based on the explanations, the Licensing and Supervisory Authority will examine what possible measures need to be taken,” Myllyoja said a fortnight ago, when the regulator wrote to Google’s subsidiary and both councils and counted 300 hectares felled at Muhos. Both sites are also under a building ban while their plans are appealed, the regulator says, and the City of Kajaani has been asked what has happened at Google’s second site at Otanmäki, where excavation and blasting began in August.
Meanwhile, Muhos municipality told the regulator on Tuesday that it has not issued the project a building permit or any other permit, a day after Google’s subsidiary was due to explain which permits its work rests on. Felling by a private landowner is “not really the municipality’s business”, its technical director, Mikko Kari, said, whilst the regulator says the building ban makes felling a matter for a landscape work permit from the municipality’s own building inspectors.
Nearly two years ago, the Finnish Government let Metsähallitus, the state forest enterprise, sell Google four parcels of state forest at Muhos and Kajaani, 1,400 hectares of mostly commercial forestry land sold as raw land for more than €27 million. Google announced three weeks ago a 13 billion euro data centre investment in Finland over two years, which it calls its largest single investment in Europe.
The association, which first asked the regulator to halt the Muhos works until the assessment is done, now wants it to use its enforcement powers against the project. Myllyoja has so far declined to say whether her agency can stop a site in such a case, and the regulator lists both assessments as unfinished.
