> It's undeniable that tons of very rare native forests were cut down alongside this (we're talking about 815 acres in Muhos and 494 acres in Kajaani). Google very clearly intended to destroy them as quickly as possible to leave activists relying on old documents and unreliable datasets to make their claims. If they'd left those native forests it would have threatened the whole construction project.
Also, what is the meaning of "GTR" in Finnish or English? Google tells me nothing.
Green Tree Retention. It specifically means the practice leaving certain trees in these planted forests but its evolved to encompass much more research and practices.
This whole debate is happening because Google rushed to clear the sites before the EIA was completed which was meant to identify the sites of dense native forests. Google claims it did its own internal reviews and preserved a few crucial sites, but the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, aka Suomen luonnonsuojeluliitto, (which is the group that got work stopped) used satellite imagery to prove there were multiple dense native forest sites that also got cut down
Google's entire bet here is that it could turn this into a "procedural issue" of "woops, we didn't quite finish the EIA before we started. oh well, we'll just pay the fine" because they clearly knew there was plenty of protected dense native forest patches. They wanted to remove all the evidence of them as quickly as possible