- EXCLUSIVE: The Trump organisation’s plan to build another golf course in Scotland could ruin the local area.
- Officials concluded last year that Trump’s existing rate “destroyed” the protected sand dune system.
- “They just killed it as a natural environment,” Bob Ward of the London School of Economics told Insider.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Before becoming president, Donald Trump was best known in Scotland as the man who pushed through the construction of an extremely controversial golf course amid fierce opposition from locals and conservationists.
The result was Trump International Golf Links, a sprawling course between the spectacular sand dunes on the Menie Estate along the shoreline of Balmedie, Aberdeenshire.
The former president is very attached to the course: He arranged a sensational photo-up in 2016 as a presidential candidate. There were even rumors that he would fly there in January to avoid President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
However, the resort caused extensive damage to local habitats, which lost their protected status due to the irreversible damage caused by the track.
And locals and conservationists now say the Trump organisation’s latest plan to build a second 18-hole golf course approved by the Aberdeenshire council last year – will cause even more environmental destruction to the environment than the existing course already has .
The rough terrain of Trump’s new golf course in Scotland is marked in red. The site of the area that lost its conservation designation due to the existing track is marked in green.
NatureScot / Annotions by Insider
Locals believe they have good reason to be concerned.
Last year, the sand dunes on the existing Trump International course lost their status as a specially designated conservation area after officials at NatureScot, a watchdog, concluded that the golf course had ‘destroyed’ the dune system causing permanent habitat loss.
The damage was so severe that officials decided it was of no use to give that part of the conservation area more special scientific status.
“Sand dunes are a dynamic system, they are driven by the wind, and therefore they go back and forth,” said Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at LSE.
“If you build a golf course on top, it means you can not let the dunes move around, so they have to stabilize it. So they planted vegetation on top of them and placed physical restrictions on them so that the dunes could not move. and it is no longer a dynamic system
“The argument that the Trump International Gulf Links used was that they protected them by stabilizing them. But what they were actually doing was that they were just killing it as a natural environment.”
“Sand dunes as a habitat are rarer than rainforests,” said Guy Ingerson, a Green politician who stood in the Scottish election in Aberdeen Central in May.
“It’s one of the world’s fastest disappearing habitats. Losing such a large area of coastal dunes like this was really devastating as an environmental issue above.”
Getty
Trump’s second course will join the existing one and be built on another area of sand dunes that remains part of the site of special scientific interest. There are fears that those too will now be destroyed, which means that the entire sand dune system will eventually be destroyed – or ‘stabilized’.
“I think it will eventually lead to further damage to all the sand dunes,” said Bob Ward of the LSE.
“There will be nothing left of the natural dune system. If you go there, you go along the coastline and there is a very large dune bank that protects the interior including the golf course. And once you entered the interior, there was this whole dune system. “But part of it has already been destroyed by the golf course – and now a larger area is going to be affected by this second golf course. The whole thing is going to be unrecognizable.”
The council said the new course would contribute to the significant social and economic benefits that are expected to be delivered by the broader development proposals in the Menie estate.
But the current course has yielded a loss of more than $ 1 million a year, and locals say the economic benefits the Trump organization promised when they built the first lane have never materialized.
Guy Ingerson said: “Mr Trump and his organization have promised the world: thousands of jobs, many new facilities for the local community. That has not happened. Why do we allow him to create a new golf course if he has not yet comply with the existing promises made? ‘
The Trump organization did not respond to a request for comment.