Time to stop counting forest biomass as ‘renewable energy’

Phasing out forest biomass as ‘renewable energy’ would yield massive benefits in terms of air pollution and climate protection, writes Mary S. Booth. To sweeten the deal, the EU should suspend fines for countries missing their renewable energy target as a consequence of efforts made, she suggests.

Mary S. Booth is the director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity (PFPI), a non-profit group.

Policymakers at COP27 are trying to advance last year’s commitments to end global deforestation. But even as they support such efforts, some EU policymakers are seeking to water down a weak – yet still important – proposal by the European Parliament that would protect forests within the EU, by disqualifying energy from burning trees and other forest biomass from counting as renewable energy.

The forest products industry obviously has the ear of key policymakers in opposing reforms. Now, thanks to an open letter from forestry scientists and practitioners, we can see what arguments they’ve been making.

What emerges is a disturbing picture of an industry that deploys dangerous misinformation, mirroring the worst trends in political tactics today. The contempt for science – and nature – evinced by the forestry letter is alarming enough, but the letter and associated lobbying come just as EU institutions are negotiating the EU’s biomass policy in the Trilogue on the Renewable Energy Directive.

At stake is the EU’s ability to achieve climate, nature restoration, and air quality goals.

Scientists tell us that meeting climate and nature targets requires restoring the EU’s degraded forests so they can store more atmospheric CO2 and support thriving ecosystems. To help meet this goal, the EU has just enacted legislation that sets member state ‘land sink’ targets to increase carbon storage in forests and other lands by 2030. The EU is also crafting nature restoration targets to reverse declines in ecosystems and biodiversity.

But in complete denial of these essential goals, the forestry letter claims “in many European countries a high level of growing wood stocks has already been reached and further accumulation of biomass appears risky under climate warming.” The forestry letter also argues that because the EU imports wood to meet demand, “it seems inadequate to set aside forest areas for wilderness, which has not been proven to maintain additional species.”

These false and anti-scientific claims indicate a frightening trend: the forest industry thinks they should be entitled to log everywhere, and they’re willing to use misinformation to accomplish that.

The EU’s forests are in trouble and need protection. A big part of the problem is intensive logging, including for biomass energy. The EU burns more than half the wood it harvests for energy, but far from being “carbon neutral”, logging and burning trees for energy hollows out forests and emits more CO2 per unit of energy than fossil fuels, increasing net emissions for decades to centuries.

The European Commission’s own scientists have repeatedly warned that burning forest biomass is undermining climate and nature restoration goals. Now, the chickens are coming home to roost.

A new analysis of government data shows steep losses and even a total collapse of the carbon sink underway in the EU’s forest powerhouses – Austria, France, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, and even Sweden, where government researchers acknowledged that losses mean Sweden may fail to meet climate goals. Some trilogue negotiators come from these countries, but many appear to be in denial of what their own government data show.

The forest sector letter boldly seeks to influence those negotiators. Its claim that prioritising forest carbon storage is “risky”, while totally unsubstantiated, nonetheless allows policymakers to say they get “different science” from forest industry representatives versus environmentalists, and thus they don’t know whom to believe. This allows them to vote for business-as-usual.

A particularly misleading statement in the letter intimates proposed biomass policy reforms would “ban” wood use: “Banning the use of wood for energy from sustainably managed forests and increasing the share of EU-forests under protection is not suitable to support Europe’s climate protection policy, has no further benefits for biodiversity and hinders circular bioeconomy.”

Every aspect of this statement is false. No one is proposing to “ban” wood-burning, but simply to stop counting burning forest biomass as renewable energy. Increasing forest protection would store more carbon and help restore biodiversity. And how better to secure the circular economy than to prioritise the use of wood for materials, rather than burning it?

Home heating is the biggest use of wood in the EU, a trend that will intensify this winter under the fuel crisis. But wood-burning is the largest source of air pollution that even before the pandemic was killing more than 1,000 EU citizens per day and costing billions each year in health impacts.

A new European Commission impact assessment finds that reducing air pollution to meet World Health Organisation standards would save hundreds of thousands of lives and yield astonishingly large net benefits of €38 to €123 billion each year for health and the environment. However, the study is clear that these benefits will not occur without significantly reducing biomass burning.

Policymakers should have reduced dependence on biomass heating years ago by removing its eligibility as renewable energy, inducing member states to invest in clean heating from heat pumps, solar, and zero-emissions electricity. They should not reject now the opportunity to achieve meaningful reform that will remove the ‘crutch’ of wood-burning that now allows member states to claim they are achieving renewable energy targets, when in fact they are undermining health and environmental goals.

What should policymakers do? Immediately capping and phasing out forest biomass as ‘renewable energy’ by 2027, or 2030 at the latest, would yield massive benefits. Member state concerns about missing renewable energy targets are almost beside the point, since climate mitigation requires actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions, not simply meeting renewable energy targets on paper.

Nonetheless, to ensure member states endorse the phase-out, the EU could suspend fines and potentially extend the phase-out deadline for countries making good-faith efforts to replace wood burning with clean renewable energy.

Redirecting biomass subsidies to clean renewables is also critical. For example, Poland’s super-polluting 205 MW Polaniec biomass electricity plant gets €65 million per year in publicly funded subsidies, money that could help thousands of households install heat pumps.

Rarely have more climate, health, environmental and financial benefits been within reach simply by stopping doing something. It’s time the EU stopped counting burning forest biomass as ‘renewable energy’.