FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
30 March, 2023
In a decision made today, EU negotiators have rejected the European Parliament’s call to constrain the burning of forest wood for energy.
The EU decision to increase its renewable energy target to 42.5% GHG by 2030 is undermined by the deplorable abandonment of a push from the EU Parliament to constrain the use of wood sourced directly from forests to fulfil the target. Constraints on burning forest biomass are crucial to ensuring that emissions reductions are genuine, and that biodiversity is not jeopardized.
Ms Peg Putt, Coordinator of the Forests, Climate and Biomass Working Group of EPN, said today:
“This EU decision is a recipe for emissions increases in the vital period for emissions reductions because it leaves the way open for further unrestrained increases in burning forest wood. It’s not an effective way to combat climate change – to do that we simply have to go beyond burning both wood and fossil fuels.”
All wood burning for energy produces immediate emissions that are at least as high as those from burning coal per unit of energy produced, and the emissions are not recovered within the vital time frames of the Paris Agreement, if ever – according to substantial expert scientific critique.
“The best way for forests to combat climate change is to let them grow so their reservoirs of carbon are kept out of the atmosphere and their continued growth pulls carbon back out of the atmosphere.”
Use of wood sourced directly from the forests depletes those natural carbon stocks and sends them into the atmosphere as well as destroying biodiversity. This is why the European Parliament had called for it not to count towards renewable energy targets. It wasn’t perfect but it was a move in the right direction, but now Europe is going to continue to drive forest destruction and climate catastrophe at home and around the world. The only restraint is that high quality roundwood isn’t burnt which was always the claim anyhow, but everything else is going into the furnace at ever increasing volumes.
“Europe has failed the test of real commitment to leadership and to integrity of renewables policy, simultaneously greenlighting destruction of biodiversity. It’s a disaster for forests everywhere that Europe plunders.”
By contrast Australia has led the way with their decision to remove native forest wood from the national Renewable Energy Target. Those changes mean that native forest biomass is not an ‘eligible renewable energy source’ and electricity it generates cannot be used to create tradeable Large-scale Generation Certificates.
The very real emissions from biomass burning are disguised by carbon accounting anomalies that fail to show them alongside the emissions of fossil fuels in the Energy Sector accounts. The EU is using this to claim illusory emissions reductions from burning woody biomass, and now sensible restraints have been lost we fear that Europe’s much vaunted new target is based on expansion of large-scale biomass burning.
This undermines the EU ambition and, in many cases, offshores emissions responsibility to countries that supplied wood imports but never created or used the energy from burning those forests. When that wood comes from developing countries, the EU is indulging in climate colonialism.
ENDS
Notes
This release is from the Forests, Climate and Biomass Working Group of the Environmental Paper Network.
Media contact
Ms Peg Putt, Coordinator – Forests, Climate and Biomass Working Group, +61 418 127 580 (Eastern Australian time zone).
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