This week members of EPN’s Biomass Working Group are attending COP27 in Egypt, to alert global leaders to the fact that the proliferation of biomass as a source of energy is having unacceptably high social and environmental costs around the world. In particular, they are shining a spotlight on the impacts of the biomass industry in Africa, whose land grabbing for monoculture tree plantations is being dubbed a new form of climate colonialism. Community representatives from the US have also travelled to Egypt to expose the disproportionate impacts that the biomass industry is having on communities of colour and to call out this environmental racism.
Kwami Kpondzo, Friends of the Earth Togo, said, “Tree plantations for energy are already being established on a large scale throughout Africa, making it inevitable that large volumes of wood will eventually be exported to be burned in the Global North to meet the rapidly growing demand for biomass. There is already evidence of this emerging trend in Ghana, where a Norwegian company (APSD) has acquired large areas of land to establish eucalyptus plantations on. The exploitation of land in the Global South by companies in the Global North to make a profit, is a form of modern day colonialism.”
Watch the video by Civic Response, Ghanaian NGO and member of the Biomass Working Group.
The current global boom in the biomass industry is in large part due to a UNFCCC carbon accounting flaw, which allows burning biomass for energy to be falsely treated as carbon neutral. At this years COP, The Biomass Working Group is demanding that energy sector accounts must record emissions from biomass combustion in the same way as they do for fossil fuels. This will resolve the false representation of biomass as being zero emissions.
Peg Putt, Policy Coordinator for the Biomass Working Group said, “Widespread concern about this fake “renewable” should be heeded by the UN climate conference, which can and should fix the root cause of the problem – the notoriously flawed accounting rules that enable a false impression of carbon neutrality to be perpetrated. On the basis of this false claim, many countries have promoted burning forests for energy at a time when we should be protecting them, to keep carbon out of the atmosphere and safeguard biodiversity.”
Read the full post “How UNFCCC carbon accounting has created a biomass delusion and is contributing to climate change and global inequity” and download the briefing here.
Did you Know?
Over 190 organisations around the world have signed a statement calling for an end to burning forest wood for large-scale energy production. Read and sign on here: https://environmentalpaper.org/the-biomass-delusion/
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