Draft carbon removals rules: will the EU’s climate action be ruined by its bioenergy policy?
13 noviembre 2024
Two decades ago, when the EU started incentivising burning wood as a form of renewable energy and counting CO2 emissions from wood combustion as ‘zero’ in the energy sector, it was possibly unaware that this would considerably increase forest destruction and climate damage. The bloc’s draft carbon removal rules perpetuate this mistake and risk causing even more harm. This time, however, ignorance is no excuse.
Today, about half the EU’s wood harvest is burnt for energy. Other wood-using industries suffer from the market distortions caused by bioenergy incentives enabled by the EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED). EU Biomass combustion emissions have doubled since these incentives were introduced, representing 15.7% of the EU’s total emissions. As a result, land and forest CO2 absorption has dropped by nearly half in the past 15 years, driven largely by excessive logging to meet bioenergy demand. RED’s ‘sustainability criteria’ for biomass have failed to ensure sustainability outcomes, and many national governments will struggle to meet their climate targets.
The overblown wood-burning industry also undermines a policy priority of the new Commission: boosting the ‘bioeconomy’ using biomass rather than fossil fuels for industrial processes. The new Commissioner for the Environment, Sweden’s Jessika Roswall, explained she was aware that “biomass is renewable but not infinite”, but she will soon discover that EU policy is on the verge of causing even greater forest destruction.
In April 2024, the EU adopted a regulation to boost CO2 removal from the atmosphere, the Carbon Removal Certification Framework (CRCF), which aims to deploy carbon removal technologies to mitigate the climate crisis. The Commission is also looking to create a compliance market, and to push Member States to use certified carbon credits to meet their 2040 climate targets.
DG CLIMA is currently drafting methodologies for individual technologies, two of which use woody biomass for ‘permanent’ carbon storage: BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) and biochar (a form of charcoal). Once adopted, these methodologies will determine the new carbon removal market’s rules. It is essential that this be done rigorously.
The CRCF refers to RED sustainability criteria as a ‘minimum’ for assessing biomass sustainability. It further stipulates that carbon accounting be defined in a “relevant, conservative, accurate, complete, consistent, comparable and transparent manner, in accordance with the latest available scientific evidence” (Article 4.4) and particularly that “indirect land use change” be included.
But the two methodologies the Commission presented to the CRCF expert group reproduce the erroneous ‘zero’ accounting approach for biomass emissions and ignore the Regulation’s other requirements.
Even worse is the proposal to count removals at the point when carbon is stored, even though biochar or BECCS CO2 removals from the atmosphere would only happen if plants are purposefully grown or regrown after harvest. By ignoring the need to only count removals after regrowth, the draft BECCS and biochar methodologies propose to reward the direct extraction of carbon from forests and ecosystems, without considering whether atmospheric CO2 removal actually occurs (for example, Drax’s BECCS projects are expected to be net emitters until 2050 and our investigation into the Stockholm Exergi project found that it would probably also fail to achieve negative emissions).
The RED has already shown how high policy ambitions coupled with erroneous carbon accounting can harm forests. By reproducing this mistake, these draft CRCF methodologies create a situation where certified carbon ‘removals’ would reward fictitious removals and possible additional emissions. If such credits are included in the EU Emissions Trading System and then bought by polluters to compensate fossil emissions, this will result not in ‘net zero’ but in rather considerable additional emissions. This is the opposite of what is needed, and a disaster for the credibility of the EU’s climate policy. The CRCF draft methodologies must be corrected to reflect reality, not legalised fictions.
Image credit: Christian Åslund / Greenpeace
Categorías: News, Forest Watch, Bioenergy, Carbon removal
