On the first day that international governments resume the COP16 biodiversity summit, a new report blows open the biodiversity scandal that is biomass energy.
As parties convene, the blistering new research is a resounding call for countries to cut the greenwashing con out of renewable picture once and for all.
Boom in biomass energy isn’t a boon for biodiversity
Ahead of the first round of negotiations in November 2024, the Biomass Action Network called on parties to urgently phase out subsidies for biomass energy.
Now, the network and EPN International has published a new report exposing the scale of ecological destruction that the sector has wreaked in recent years. Moreover, it highlights the destruction biomass energy will continue to foment without urgent international and government intervention.
The new report Burning up the Biosphere: A Global Threat Map of Biomass Energy Development warns that the global biomass energy industry will triple by 2030. This will increase woody biomass supply from monoculture plantations by 13 times and woody biomass supply overall by three times.
As it currently stands, the sector will put natural forests on the chopping block. These will supply the wood that countries increasingly burn for energy production. As a result, it will unleash a wave of intensified logging, degradation, and plantation conversion. Of course, this will exacerbate both the climate and biodiversity crises, and adversely affect communities throughout the global supply chains.
Overall, bioenergy contributes 60% of the world’s renewable energy supply, dwarfing the shares of wind and solar. The industry promotes biomass as a form of renewable energy and receives large subsidies. This is despite disproven claims of carbon neutrality and flawed carbon accounting that fails to show the significant carbon emissions at the smokestack of biomass energy generation.
Explosive increase in biomass – explosive increase in environmental and social harms
The report analysed statistics and predictions of international agencies. It did this alongside accumulating evidence of the impacts of this controversial energy source, and found that:
● Woody biomass supply will triple between 2021 and 2030. This will include an incredible and dangerous increase of wood supply from monoculture plantations of 13 times current levels to meet demand.
● This comes on top of a previous 50% increase between 2010 and 2021. That includes a 250% increase in global wood pellet production which reached 47.5m tonnes in 2022.
● To secure such a large supply of biomass will necessitate countries expand monoculture tree plantations. This is already driving deforestation and conversion of Indonesia’s rainforests, among others. In Indonesia alone, implementing existing plans for large-scale bioenergy development could result in companies converting up to 10 million hectares of forest into these “energy” plantations.
● The logging of woody biomass for energy has numerous adverse environmental and social impacts. These include contributing to the decline of the forest carbon sink in the EU. Alongside that, it will foment the deforestation and degradation of valuable forests worldwide. That includes biodiverse old-growth and primary forests in North America, Europe and Asia. And in the process, it will trigger more human rights violations. Logging and biomass pellet production has long-lasting impacts on human health for instance. Moreover, it will mean more land-grabbing of Indigenous and local communities’ land in the Global South.
Drax is biomass public enemy number 1 – thanks to the UK
The report comes as hot off the heels of the UK Labour Party government greenlighting another round of subsidies for greenwashing biomass giant Drax. Specifically, on Monday 10 February, it extended them past 2027, into 2031.
The report highlighted that:
Europe remains the undisputed leader in burning wood pellets for biomass energy. In 2022, consumption of this fuel in the EU Member States and UK reached 30.4 million tonnes, equivalent to 64% of global production in that year.
Notably, it singled out the UK as the worst offender at 7.8m tonnes in 2022 – more than a quarter of Europe’s consumption. It also underscored that the UK had imported:
more than 95% of its fuel from overseas, primarily the United States.
Of course, Drax’s Yorkshire power plant – as the biggest burner of woody biomass globally – has a lot to do with this.
Unsurprisingly, the climate-wrecking corporation featured repeatedly in the report. It pointed out that pollution from Drax pellet mills in the US are having devastating impacts on nearby communities’ health. One line in the report encapsulated this stark reality for frontline communities living in the vicinity of Drax’s polluting mills:
people living in the communities located next to these facilities are relying on oxygen tanks to
survive.
It’s these facilities where the UK is largely sourcing its wood pellets from. And, while US states and other countries have issued fines and violation notices to a Drax-owned pellet mills for breaching air pollution rules, as the report noted:
Unfortunately, the fines it has received pale in significance to the amount of money Drax gets from the UK government in the form of subsidies to burn biomass, so they have done little to curb the industry.
Crucially, these “lavish subsidies” are at the crux of the issue, and the UNFCCC “flawed emissions accounting rules” are partly to blame. This is because, as the report underscored:
They were the basis for the introduction of policies promoting biomass energy in the UK, EU member states, South Korea, Japan and Indonesia, among others.
Notably, this mechanism has enabled countries and companies burning biomass to consider emissions to be zero.
Governments failing to heed the cautionary call
Given the findings, the Biomass Action Network recommends that:
- International governments and bodies must change the current, flawed biomass carbon accounting rules. This applies to those under UNFCCC and related IPCC reporting methodologies.
- States should exclude large-scale biomass energy from national and international climate targets.
- Co-firing woody biomass with coal should not be considered to be a form of abatement of fossil fuel emissions.
- Governments must stop all support – especially financial subsidies – for biomass.
In 2021, Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) collaborated for the first time. They warned against planting bioenergy crops in monocultures over a very large share of land areas, saying:
such crops are detrimental to ecosystems when deployed at very large scales, reducing nature’s contributions to people and impeding achievement of many of the Sustainable Development Goals.
However, this report finds that international bodies and governments are set to ignore this cautionary call from the experts.
Burning up the biosphere, but enough is enough
EPN’s Biomass Action Network coordinator and co-author of the report Peg Putt said:
We are literally burning up the biosphere as industry and governments greenwash forest destruction, increased carbon pollution, harms to human health, and land grabbing for massive plantation expansions as climate action. Far from being renewable, it’s reprehensible.
Plans to triple large-scale biomass burning within the decade, and for an energy plantation planting spree that would increase monoculture plantations by thirteen times, are shocking. Subsidising this is pulling support away from genuine low emissions renewables, but redirecting them into positive climate action would assist with finding sorely needed financing.
We hope this report will be a wake-up call to those international agencies promoting expansion of biomass energy; to governments that are subsidising coal-to-biomass power plant conversions; will persuade investors that financing biomass power is not sustainable; and will persuade energy analysts, retailers and consumers to distinguish forest biomass, as a high-carbon ‘renewable’ energy technology, from lower-emitting technologies like wind and solar.
Featured image via the Canary
