Destroying our carbon sink Arterra/UIG via Getty

It looks like greenwash. European nations publicly keen to boost their climate credentials by switching to “green” biomass are accused of working behind the scenes to expunge their carbon emissions from burning wood in power stations from national emissions statistics.

“If we don’t measure emissions when trees are cut, we won’t measure them at all,” says Hannah Mowat of FERN, a European NGO working to save the continent’s forests, who has followed the EU negotiations on the issue.

Under international climate treaties such as the Paris Agreement, burning biomass like wood is defined as carbon-neutral, even though it emits as least as much carbon as fossil fuels. The assumption is that new trees will be grown to take up the carbon emitted from the burning.


If countries reduce their forest cover – as a result of harvesting trees for biomass burning or anything else – the carbon loss should show up in national statistics under a complex accounting process known as LULUCF, for Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry.

But measuring carbon stocks on the land and in forests is an inexact science, and critics say the LULUCF rules are wide open to accounting errors.

On 19 June, European environment ministers will set their own rules for LULUCF carbon accounting. How they do this will play an important role in Europe meeting its emissions targets under the Paris Agreement.

But Mowat says that countries with plans to replace coal and nuclear fuel burning with wood are lobbying for rules that will obscure likely resulting emissions.

“France, Austria, Sweden and Finland are fighting tooth and nail to weaken the EU’s rules,” Mowat told New Scientist. “This is because they all plan to significantly increase the amount of trees they cut in the next decade: Finland will increase harvesting by 25 per cent and France by 20 per cent, and they don’t want to count the emissions.”

Government data show that France plans to increase timber harvesting by 12 million cubic metres by 2026. Finland plans a 15 million cubic metre increase, almost entirely for burning more wood in power stations.

Fewer trees will mean less carbon being soaked up from the atmosphere, too.

Mowat estimates that the reduction in the EU’s total forest carbon sink between now and 2030 is equivalent to the emissions of 100 million cars.

The EU would not comment on the negotiations, but agreed that the sink is set to reduce. A spokesman pointed New Scientist to a 2016 EU report that forecast “a more than 30 per cent reduction in the forest management sink” between 2005 and 2030 in the 28 EU countries. A reduction in which “biomass and land use change can be identified as key drivers”.

“Across Europe, when large power plants switch from burning coal to burning biomass from forests, this is considered ‘green’ and they are not required to account for their carbon emissions,” says Sasha Stashwick, senior advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in the US. “But the atmosphere doesn’t care about our accounting tricks. Burning wood for electricity increases carbon pollution for many decades compared to coal.”

“This continued support for biomass burning appears particularly backward against the backdrop of tumbling solar and wind prices across Europe and the world,” she says. “European governments can’t continue to give a free pass to dirty and destructive bioenergy and must invest in 21st-century energy solutions like solar and wind.”

Read more: Europe’s green energy policy is a disaster for the environment