A leaked draft of the Bioeconomy Strategy reveals the European Commission’s usual struggles to reconcile industrial interests with the unignorable reality of rising CO2 and degraded forests. Still, there are some signs of hope. Here’s a quick overview:
Recognizing the need to reduce pressure on ecosystems
As the European Commission’s own scientists are warning, the EU’s forest and land carbon sink is cratering under current levels of harvesting and cropping, and ecosystems are increasingly degraded. NGOs have repeatedly pointed out that if bioeconomy incentives increase demand, this will only harm nature and the climate further. It’s thus good to see the leaked draft state that “the pressure on ecosystems must be considerably reduced”. One litmus test for whether the Bioeconomy Strategy deserves to be treated as a serious piece of policymaking is whether this statement makes it into the final draft.
Worryingly, however, the strategy states that in developing new EU-wide sustainability criteria for the Bioeconomy, “existing national systems and long-standing sustainable forest management practices should be fully recognised [and] …remain proportionate, practical and tailored”. If existing systems and practices were actually sustainable, forest ecosystems and the land carbon sink would not be in decline. If the Commission defers to vague industry “standards” that lack teeth and provide greenwashing cover to intensive forestry, then the new criteria will just be slapping new paint on the same old rotten fence.
Calling to reduce subsidies for bioenergy
If the goal is to tie up carbon in long-lived products made from wood and other biomass, the last thing policy should do is pay people to burn biomass. Indeed, some of the people most loudly complaining about bioenergy subsidies are lobbyists for other wood-using industries, like the Renewable Carbon Initiative (we’ve reviewed their proposals, and agree with them that bioenergy subsidies are a waste).
The draft duly calls for deprioritizing bioenergy use and subsidies, which it calls “leveling the playing field” for other biomass users.
Proposing to reform biogenic carbon accounting
Burning wood emits more CO2 per unit energy than burning fossil fuels, and forests obviously don’t regrow immediately to offset bioenergy emissions. Nonetheless, the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive (RED) claims biomass effectively has “zero” CO2 emissions if it’s harvested in compliance with the RED’s sustainability criteria. This contradicts IPCC GHG reporting rules, which rightly see “sustainability” (sensu the balance of growth and harvesting) as irrelevant to calculating net emissions. EU policy won’t properly value the contributions of forests and wood products to climate mitigation until it reforms its carbon accounting approach to reflect “what the atmosphere sees.” Thus, it is possibly a hopeful sign that the leaked draft mentions the Commission intends to revise rules for biogenic carbon accounting, though given how deep the myth of “sustainable” biomass has sunk its claws into every aspect of EU forest and climate policy, enacting truly science-based carbon accounting could take a long time. It seems particularly unlikely that any new thinking associated with the Bioeconomy Strategy will have the clout to rectify the damaging approach enshrined in the RED.
But also just more of the same old carbon shell-game
The leaked draft appears to automatically accept that storing biomass carbon in products makes a meaningful contribution to climate mitigation, failing to recognize the need for additionality. In other words, shuffling carbon from pool to pool won’t pull more carbon from the atmosphere unless ecosystems respond by sequestering additional carbon beyond what they would otherwise.
Hope for a science-based policy?
Incentivizing the bioeconomy to help the climate is putting the cart before the horse. To avoid the mistakes of the first and second Bioeconomy Strategies, which pumped public funding into projects of dubious merit, the Commission should commit to rigorous up-front science-based GHG accounting that ensures projects will actually reduce GHG emissions. It’s not encouraging to see the leaked draft repeating the same old tropes.
However, the draft does represent progress because it recognizes the problems with bioenergy and the primacy of reducing pressure on ecosystems. Nonetheless, real progress will only occur if the Commission gets carbon accounting and sustainability criteria right. That’s a very, very big “if.”
