After years of flouting the LULUCF regulation by allowing the forest industry to log its way though the forest carbon sink, the Finnish and Swedish Prime Ministers have written to Commission president Ursula Von Der Leyen asking to be released from their forest carbon sink obligations.
See the joint NGO response to the Prime Ministers’ letter here.
Presumably trying to avoid fines for collapsing their carbon sinks and putting the EU’s climate targets at risk, the Prime Ministerial double-act suggest ways to cook emissions reporting to ensure logging does not have to be “much decreased”, including wanting to “ensure access to the use of flexibilities in the regulation”, and “greater recognition of the substitution effects”.
The first concerns making sure they can wriggle out of commitments through loopholes like blaming carbon losses from bark beetle outbreaks on climate change (rather than the real reason: replacing natural forests with vulnerable monoculture plantations), or ignoring emissions from the vast tracts of peat soils drained by their forest industries. The second, “greater recognition of the substitution effect”, regards another book-cooking technique that over-weights emissions “avoided” when other materials are replaced by wood.
Sweden and Finland frequently lobby on behalf of their intensive forestry industries. But such a high-profile display seems particularly craven given how both countries are still logging the few remaining old growth forests in the EU.
See the joint NGO response to the PM letter here.
