Forest advocates have long warned that burning forest biomass to make energy — touted as a climate solution by the forestry industry — releases more carbon emissions than coal does per unit of electricity generated.

Forest advocates have long warned that burning forest biomass to make energy — touted as a climate solution by the forestry industry — releases more carbon emissions than coal does per unit of electricity generated. They’ve argued that cutting trees to turn them into wood pellets degrades forest carbon stores and biodiversity.

This week those arguments are finally being heard at the COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia. Also being seriously considered are the “perverse subsidies” offered to the forestry industry by national governments to convert forests into wood pellets, and to biomass power plants that burn those pellets.

These issues have not achieved such a high level of official notice before at a UN summit and could result in the question of forest biomass subsidies being raised at the COP29 climate meeting next month in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The illogic of forest biomass burning was especially noted by Barry Gardiner, a UK member of Parliament who objects to huge taxpayer subsidies paid to Drax, a British biomass power plant operator. “That’s $9 billion in public money spent making our air pollution and our carbon emissions worse,” while razing forests.

CALI, Colombia – For years, at annual United Nations climate summits, forest advocates eager to draw critical attention to the scientifically dubious benefits of burning forest biomass to make energy were ignored, and their recommendations never added to official UN agendas for discussion or a vote.

But here at the UN Biodiversity summit, known as COP16, forest campaigners have attained some traction as national representatives — dedicated to addressing biodiversity loss and global deforestation — hear about how wood pellet production and biomass burning are tied intrinsically to both problems.

On October 21, the first day of COP16, the Biomass Action network, a coalition of 200 civil society groups in 60 countries, held a series of events (including in Cali) to highlight research and evidence of environmental harm caused by harvesting trees for wood-pellet manufacture, and the burning of those pellets in former coal-fired power plants.

This broadening awareness comes at a crucial moment: The demand for forest biomass energy is surging in the United Kingdom, European Union, Japan and South Korea, where national governments erroneously claim burning pellets produces zero emissions.

Meanwhile, the supply of pellets to meet that demand (so far sourced mostly from forests in the Southeastern United States and British Columbia, Canada), is expanding rapidly into the tropics, with new pellet mills planned and opening in Vietnam and especially Indonesia.

The clear cutting of forests to supply biomass is happening despite a rapidly escalating climate crisis in which intact forests — with their ability to store carbon — along with thriving biodiversity, remain among the best means of slowing the rate of global warming.

“Wood biomass energy is driving a modern form of colonialism in tropical forest nations like Indonesia,” Amalya Oktaviani with the Indonesian NGO Trend Asia, said in a statement. “Industrial timber plantations have historically caused deforestation, displaced Indigenous communities and reduced biodiversity.”

Delegates from different parts of the world gather to negotiate the details of global conservation agreements at the United Nations biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia.

Delegates from different parts of the world gather to negotiate the details of global conservation agreements at the United Nations biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

Biomass on the agenda at COP16

In Cali, bioenergy is on the agenda and represented in two crucial documents (one under negotiation, the other already approved at COP15 in Montreal in 2022).

That’s happening as the countries who have grown dependent on biomass energy promote its usage via national policies that pay out billions annually in public subsidies as the most expedient way to phase out coal burning (required in those countries by 2030), and as a means of meeting their Paris climate agreement emission targets (if only on paper).

In the Biodiversity and Climate Change section of COP16’s primary operational document, paragraph 14 notes that “the large-scale deployment of intensive bioenergy plantations, including monocultures, replacing natural forests and subsistence farmland will likely have negative impacts on biodiversity and can threaten food and water security, as well as local livelihoods, including intensifying social conflicts.”

For that proposed paragraph, and what it entails, to survive the official negotiating process (or for the survival of two other similar paragraphs), at least one must outlast editing sessions during the final week of the COP16 summit.

But the fact that the language linking bioenergy to its environmental harms even survived the first week of revisions is viewed with optimism by forest advocate, after years of being disregarded at climate summits.

“The focus on plantations in the text in Cali probably derives from the concerns expressed by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] about the potential for a big expansion of monoculture plantations for bioenergy,” said Peg Putt, with the Environmental Paper Network, an Australia-based NGO; she is not in Cali. “That’s why we find it [as a] Climate and Biodiversity agenda item. It’s evidence of the growing concerns in the climate world, in addition to the biodiversity world, for the comprehensive impact [of biomass burning] on natural forests.”

Souparna Lahiri, a climate campaigner with the Global Forest Coalition in India, is following the potential acceptance or changes to paragraph 14 in Cali. He is encouraged by the original wording but recognizes that it could vanish if pellet-producing countries such as Canada or Malaysia, for example, voice persuasive concerns.

Souparna Lahiri, a climate campaigner with Global Forest Coalition in India

Souparna Lahiri, a climate campaigner with Global Forest Coalition in India, has been speaking out against forest biomass for energy on various panels at COP16 and tracking the language in a key summit document pertaining to issues related to bioenergy. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

The trouble with ‘perverse subsidies’

The item Lahiri finds most encouraging in Cali is Target 18 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, approved by 196 nations at COP15 two years ago. Target 18 calls for the phasing out — followed by the elimination by 2030 — of $1.7 trillion in subsides that do harm to forests, oceans and biodiversity. The forestry industry, of which forest biomass is a small part, receives a collective $155 billion in “perverse subsidies,” as they are called at COP16.

Lahiri sees both paragraph 14 and Target 18 as potential “entry points” for forest advocates like himself and others in the Biomass Action Network to finally make the agenda at the far larger and more prominent UN climate summit set to open in Baku, Azerbaijan, on November 11. “We are getting traction here, and that’s encouraging,” he said.

Eleanora Fasan, a forest advocate with Solutions for our Planet, an NGO in South Korea, said the adoption of Target 18, and the intention during COP16 to develop concrete strategies to phase out subsidies, should put pressure on South Korea.

“This would then mean that the Korean government would have to actually make a plan to account for the harmful subsidies that are going into bioenergy and biomass, and possibly even revise them,” Fasan said in Cali.

Attendance seemed to double at the start of the second and final week of the UN Biodiversity meeting in Cali, Colombia. 

Attendance seemed to double at the start of the second and final week of the UN Biodiversity meeting in Cali, Colombia. Colorful wall panels throughout the venue illustrate Colombia’s vast biodiversity from its coast to the Amazonian mountains. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

A voice from Britain

It is exceedingly rare that a politician speaks out vigorously, and over many years, against forest biomass energy. But Barry Gardiner, of Great Britain’s Labour Party and a member of Parliament for 27 years, is that rare voice.

On Sunday, October 27, at a side event to COP16 in which implementation of Target 18 was the daylong focus, Gardiner was the keynote speaker. He delivered a 22-minute address highlighting shortsighted politicians who argue we must make a false choice between the economy and the environment. And he derided perverse subsidies that allow bad climate and biodiversity policies to persist and thrive.

But he reserved his harshest comments for Drax, a company that delivers 4% of the UK’s energy by burning wood pellets produced in the U.S. and Canada — some made in Drax’s own pellet mills.

“The company has claimed almost $9 billion from British taxpayers to support its biomass energy generation since 2012, even though burning wood pellets for power generation releases more emissions per unit of electricity generated than burning gas or coal,” Gardiner said. “That’s $9 billion in public money spent making our air pollution and our carbon emissions worse. More than that, Drax has been responsible for destroying some of the most precious old-growth, virgin forests in Canada, where some of the pellets come from.”

For its part, Drax maintains publicly that it is a climate-friendly, renewable-energy solution. It claims all carbon emissions created by burning pellets are reabsorbed by newly planted trees, allegedly making forest biomass carbon neutral.

Because of that official renewable-energy designation, countries like the UK do not count emissions at the smokestack from burning wood pellets, a myth critics tirelessly discount.

“Even if it were true that new trees could absorb all those carbon emissions,” Gardiner said, “we know it takes 40 to 100 years for neutrality to take place. We don’t have that kind of time.”

Barry Gardiner is a Labour Party member of the British Parliament who has been speaking out against public subsidies for forest biomass energy in the United Kingdom for more than a decade. 

Barry Gardiner is a Labour Party member of the British Parliament who has been speaking out against public subsidies for forest biomass energy in the United Kingdom for more than a decade. He spoke at a side event at COP16 and showed a photo of the cooling towers at Drax, a UK energy company that is one of the world’s single-largest consumers of wood pellets for energy. The company has received roughly $9 billion in subsidies over the years from British taxpayers. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

Asked after his speech why more members of Parliament aren’t joining him in his ardent opposition to Drax subsidies, Gardiner offered an explanation that transcends the UK and extends to most countries paying “perverse subsidies” for biomass energy.

“The reason the government has been so reluctant to admit that it is the emperor’s new clothes is that they don’t know where else to get the energy,” Gardiner said. “They ask: how are we going to fill that 4% hole and still achieve the decarbonization of the entire power sector by 2030? If you take Drax out, it becomes much more difficult to do.”

Gardiner said Target 18 might just help. He added that Britain’s new secretary of state, David Lammy, has been studying the issues surrounding biomass energy and its subsidies and may decide that it’s a bad deal for Britain’s people and government.

“He will be in Cali during the last week,” Gardiner said. “I hope it broadens his perspective.”

Banner image: Drax is the largest consumer of wood pellets for energy in the UK. It also operates more than a dozen wood pellet mills in the Southeastern United States and British Columbia. Here, truckers carry whole trees to the Drax mill in Smithers, B.C., Canada, to be chipped and then pressed into wood pellets for export to Asia. Image courtesy of Stand.Earth. 

Justin Catanoso, a regular contributor, is a professor of journalism at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. His COP16 reporting is supported by the Sabin Center for Environment and Sustainability at his university.

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