Burning forests for energy isn’t ‘renewable’

The EU’s classification of wood fuels is accelerating the climate crisis. Next week, a key vote can change that

The future of many of the world’s forests will be decided soon when members of the European parliament vote on a revised EU renewable energy directive. If the parliament fails to change the EU’s discredited and harmful renewables policy, European citizens’ tax money will continue to pay for forests around the globe to literally go up in smoke every day.

Europe’s directly elected representatives now have to choose: they can either save the EU’s “climate targets” with their legislative loopholes or they can begin saving our climate, because right now, that is not what EU targets are working towards.

Increasing volumes of wood pellets and other wood fuels are being imported from outside the EU to satisfy Europe’s growing appetite for burning forests for energy. This is an appetite that the existing EU renewable energy directive incentivises. It does this by classifying forest biomass on paper as zero-carbon emissions when in reality; burning forest biomass will produce higher emissions than fossil fuels during the coming decisive decades.

The interlinked crises of wars and rising food and energy prices underline the urgent need for policies that enable energy saving and energy efficiency, and the importance of decarbonising the EU’s energy sector. It should be obvious that decarbonising can only be done by using non-carbon energy sources. It is critical to phase out fossil fuels, but the energy sources we replace them with are just as important.

The EU’s renewable energy directive should apply solely to actual renewable energy forms – and forests are not renewable. Forests are ecosystems created by nature that cannot be replanted. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that we need to restore and preserve more forest ecosystems – but as internationally renowned scientists have warned, the EU’s renewable energy directive incentivises a daily loss of irreplaceable forest ecosystems in favour of the harmful replanting of new trees.

There is just not enough time for these tree plantations to regrow to be in line with the Paris agreement. Forest biomass takes minutes to burn, whereas it takes anywhere from decades to centuries for the climate and environmentally harmful tree plantations to resequester the carbon emitted. This equals decades of carbon debts that we do not have time for.

The same goes for the burning of what the industry calls forest residues, such as treetops and branches. Burning any part of the tree means burning carbon. When forestry residues come from an 80-year-old tree, it will take 80 years for an equivalent tree to regrow – and this is time we do not have.

For forest residues to become sustainable end-products, forestry needs to be sustainable in the first place; but this is not the case today.

The writer is widely acclaimed Swedish environmental activist