Protected woodlands in Europe felled to meet EU renewable targets

Specially protected forests are being indiscriminately felled across Europe to meet the EU’s renewable energy targets, according to an investigation by the conservation group Birdlife.

According to reports in the Guardian, Birdlife found logging taking place in conservation zones such as Poloniny national park in eastern Slovakia and in Italian riverside forests around Emilia-Romagna, where it said it had been falsely presented as flood-risk mitigation.

Bioenergy fuel is supposed to be harvested from residue such as forest waste but, under current legislation, European bioenergy plants do not have to produce evidence that their wood products have been sustainably sourced.

In Slovakia, the drive to reach the EU’s renewable energy targets has seen a 72% increase in the use of wood for bioenergy since 2007, according to Birdlife’s Black Book of Bioenergy paper.

Sini Eräjää, Birdlife’s bioenergy officer, told the Guardian: “This report provides clear evidence that the EU’s renewable energy policies have led to increased harvesting of whole trees and to continued use of food crops for energy. We are subsidising large-scale environmental destruction, not just outside Europe, as in Indonesia or the US, but also right in our own backyard.”

The logging of whole trees releases all of their stored carbon and drains the planet’s “carbon sink” or potential for absorbing more emissions. Even if new saplings are planted, it may take 50 years or more until they are able to compensate for felled trees, by which point experts fear tipping points for runaway warming could have been reached.

Europe’s carbon sink is forecast by the EU to decline by about 100m tonnes between 2020 and 2030, partly because of logging for bioenergy.