The global biomass energy industry will triple by 2030, increasing woody biomass supply from monoculture plantations by 13 times and woody biomass supply overall by three times, according to a new report Burning up the Biosphere: A Global Threat Map of Biomass Energy Development released on Monday 18 November by the Biomass Action Network of EPN International.
Biomass: no solution at all to the climate crisis
The natural forests which supply the wood burnt for energy production will suffer from intensified logging, degradation, and plantation conversion, exacerbating both the climate and biodiversity crises and adversely affecting communities throughout the global supply chains.
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 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.
The report analysed statistics and predictions of international agencies, as well as accumulating evidence of the impacts of this controversial energy source.
A tripling of woody biomass supply for energy is predicted to occur 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 the quantities required.
This comes on top of a previous 50% increase between 2010 and 2021, including a 250% increase in global wood pellet production which reached 47.5 million tonnes in 2022.
Driving deforestation and human rights violations
Securing such a large supply of biomass will necessitate the expansion of monoculture tree plantations, which 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 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, the deforestation and degradation of valuable forests worldwide (including old-growth and primary forests in North America, Europe and Asia), and human rights violations such as long-lasting impacts on human health and the grabbing of Indigenous and local communities’ land in the Global South.
The Biomass Action Network recommends that:
- The current, flawed biomass carbon accounting rules under UNFCCC and related IPCC reporting methodologies, must be changed.
- Large-scale biomass energy should be excluded 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.
- All governmental support for biomass, especially financial support in the form of subsidies, must be stopped.
Biomass: burning up the biosphere
“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,” said Peg Putt, a coordinator of EPN’s Biomass Action Network and a co-author of the report:
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.
A first ever collaboration between IPBES and the IPCC in 2021 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”.
But this report finds this cautionary call from the experts is set to be ignored.
Featured image via the Canary
