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Communities & forests | 19 May 2021

Unsustainable and Ineffective: Why EU Forest Biomass Standards won’t stop destruction
Communities & forests
Defending habitats
Forests & trade

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Unsustainable and Ineffective: Why EU Forest Biomass Standards won’t stop destruction

There has been intense criticism of the European Union (EU) Renewable Energy
Directive (RED) for leading to adverse impacts on forests in Europe and beyond.

To tackle these concerns, the EU developed sustainability criteria that forest biomass must meet to be counted towards EU renewable energy targets (and therefore be eligible for subsidies). These criteria were included in the second iteration of the RED (REDII), for which the European Commission (EC) is developing a set of Operational Guidelines by means of an implementing regulation.

The EC is now revising REDII, and paying particular attention to these sustainability criteria. It is essential that they look at the effect that current biomass sustainability criteria would have on the ground. We therefore accompany this legal analysis of the REDII biomass sustainability criteria with several case studies, demonstrating the fundamental weaknesses which render existing criteria practically meaningless. It shows that they fail to ensure that bioenergy is produced without harming forests, or in a way that helps tackle the climate crisis, and that only a limited number of EU wood burning facilities are required to abide by them.

The treatment of biomass in EU policy is predicated on the overly simplistic and flawed idea that biomass can be a source of renewable energy that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions without harming forests.

For this to start being true, there must be an immediate and substantial revision of current rules.