The EU is one of the largest drivers of tropical deforestation. Consumption of agricultural commodities has given the EU a huge and largely unacknowledged footprint in the rainforests. To reduce its forest footprint, the EU must...
25/11/2016
The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change was a landmark, which put the use of land-based sinks such as forests at the heart of the global blueprint for stemming global warming.This raises two problems.1. It may encourage the...
25/10/2016
A Dangerous Delusion exposes the myth that problems don’t exist with biomass from Europe’s forests – where the EU sources most of its biomass – because they are managed sustainably. It includes case studies on Sweden, Romania,...
19/10/2016
The European Commission has announced that it will propose a new and improved bioenergy sustainability policy for the use of biomass in heating, electricity and transport as part of its Climate and Energy Package for 2030.
This...
05/09/2016
In recent years, a growing body of evidence has shown how large scale agricultural companies are driving land grabs and deforestation in the tropics. This report is a contribution to the debate on how to tackle these issues. It...
27/07/2016
There are no harmonised sustainability criteria for bioenergy or the sourcing of biomass across the European Union (EU). EU Member States have therefore largely relied on domestic Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) rules to guide...
26/07/2016
Fern has published research showing that the FLEGT Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) have led to clear improvements in forest governance. the publication of the research came as the European Commission released an...
04/05/2016
As the ratification process for the Paris Climate Agreement begins, a new study produced by the Oeko-Institut for Fern has shown how the EU’s new policy on land and forests could help it to be more ambitious on its climate change...
22/04/2016