The EU Bioeconomy Strategy: A missed opportunity to turn limited wood supply into high-value supply chains
10 diciembre 2025
On 27 November 2025, the Commission’s published its long-awaited Bioeconomy Strategy, which skips over meaningful discussion of environmental limits and overconsumption in favour of commercial considerations. Will any of the new groups and analyses currently being proposed tackle these crucial issues?
Business as usual: The Strategy still starts from a regulations-are-market-barriers perspective and focuses on investment and growth. It is peppered with promises of new technology - as long as industry receives public funding and is given a captive market to produce new bio-based products. It strengthens worrying EU trends to support nature and carbon credits – long known to be false ‘solutions’ – with a fundamentally flawed claim that “nature itself can become part of Europe’s competitiveness”.
The Partnership for Policy Integrity describes the Strategy as a quest to “create more biomass out of thin air”. Europe has already exceeded its ecological boundaries, yet the final Strategy eliminates a crucial statement of the previous draft: “pressure on ecosystems must be considerably reduced”. Wood supply is limited and threatened by poor forest management, and the climate and biodiversity crises. The strategy should have provided clear guidelines to Europe’s businesses to make sure European forests are better managed.
The strategy risks boosting still greater extractivism abroad: its objective to “streamlin[e] requirements and facilitat[e] market entry” or “reduc[e] unnecessary trade barriers” would seem to emphasise smoothing the path to commerce for anything ‘bio’, adding to pressures already confronting tropical and boreal forests. The strategy ignores lessons learned from palm oil agrofuels, which have been destroying primary rainforests for 20 years.
The Strategy failed to grasp the opportunity to reallocate public funding and misguided biomass subsidies towards high-value uses of wood and biomass, as the cascading-use principle stipulates. Redirection of these precious resources away from large-scale, low-margin uses would have been vital to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in rural economies.
This is particularly frustrating when it comes to ‘bioenergy’; burning wood and dedicated crops for energy is among its most wasteful uses – and currently incentivised by the EU renewable energy policy.
Growing demand for wood energy is weakening EU forests’ capacity to absorb carbon dioxide. Competing wood-using sectors (including pulp and paper, wood panels and furniture) have consistently criticised the subsidies for cutting into their supply. An early draft called for “disincentivising inefficient bioenergy combustion” but this was removed and Commissioner Jessika Roswall ducked questions about it during the 27 November Commission press point. She also claimed the Renewable Energy Directive’s sustainability criteria would help stop bioenergy from driving forest destruction, although these criteria have been criticised at length by the European Commission’s own scientific advisers.
Worryingly, the strategy foresees an assessment of the “impact of Member States’ support schemes for biomass, including on biodiversity, climate and the environment, and on possible market distortions”, in 2027 – after the legislative proposal for the post-2030 Renewable Energy Directive, which is foreseen in 2026. Proposing an impact assessment after a legislative proposal is not sound policy making and contravenes the EU’s own better regulation guidelines.
It is hard to have an opinion about the strategy’s plan for numerous new “Alliances”, “Forums”, “Groups”, and “Partnerships” and their various remits. Depending on how these are set up, they could be meaningful engagement spaces, a distraction, or avenues that privilege industry access to regulators. The risk is that only stakeholders with representation capacity – often large industries – are heard, sidelining direct input from those on the front line: small businesses, foresters, forest owners, and civil society.
Ultimately, the strategy fails to answer urgent questions of paramount importance to a thriving bioeconomy, namely, how to safeguard raw materials. For example, given the failings of monoculture and clearcut management, how can the EU increase its forests’ robustness, carbon sequestration and biodiversity? And how can the EU optimise use of the limited wood supply to deliver high added-value supply chains, particularly in rural economies?
Image: Doralin Samuel Tunas / Shutterstock
Categorías: News, Forest Watch, Bioeconomy
