Melanie Coath, Senior Climate Change Policy Officer
UK sustainability standards for bioenergy, burning wood and other organic materials for heat and power, have finally been published today by the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC). These standards are intended to safeguard wildlife and the climate while ever greater amounts of bioenergy are brought on stream. However, we are concerned to see that significant gaps remain in the new proposals.
The RSPB has been calling on the Government to ensure that all wood burned for bioenergy is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). The FSC standard provides robust environmental protection and is currently the only credible internationally recognised standard. However, instead the Government is proposing to rely on a weaker standard devised for timber procurement.
On the climate side, there are some improvements in today’s new policy but substantial gaps remain. The rationale for using bioenergy is that it has the potential to be significantly better for the climate than fossil fuel alternatives. We are glad, therefore, to see that from 2020 onwards, the new proposals will require bioenergy to reduce emissions by 72% compared to fossil fuels and by 75% by 2025. However, until 2020, this threshold is set at an unambitious 60%, much lower than bioenergy has the potential to achieve.
That concern is, however, dwarfed by key omissions elsewhere in proposals for calculating bioenergy’s carbon emissions. We are very disappointed to see that carbon debt (the time taken for emissions from bioenergy to be recaptured by new trees) has been completely ignored. This means that substantial emissions from burning bioenergy in the short term have been wiped off the slate. Many authoritative sources have shown that this can even make biomass more polluting than fossil fuels. RSPB highlighted the importance of this issue in a report earlier this year.
Emissions from indirect land use change also do not feature. These arise where energy crops displace food crops onto previously uncultivated land resulting in substantial emissions if forests are cleared or grasslands ploughed up. This issue is being ignored despite the fact that the UK is currently in negotiations with other Member States on proposals to deal with this for liquid biofuels for transport.
Strangely, DECC’s own carbon calculator, which it has spent months working on, is not due to be published until the autumn. That Government has taken the decision to publish greenhouse gas standards before that research has been completed is surprising.
If DECC is refusing to consider major emissions from carbon debt and robust safeguards for wildlife such as FSC, then it begs the question: is the Government effectively accepting that sufficiently robust sustainability and carbon standards are not possible? Such a suggestion would have serious implications for the overall role that forest biomass should play in our electricity system. It appears that Government are starting to recognise this in other recent proposals to introduce a 400MW limit on plants that are specifically built for burning biomass and to end all financial support for coal power stations converted to wood in 2027. However, they are skirting over the serious damage that large scale wood power, especially that based on wood imports from overseas, could cause to forests and the climate during the interim period.
The RSPB believes it is possible for genuinely sustainable bioenergy to be an important part of the renewable energy mix. We want to see a fresh push behind measures such as anaerobic digestion from wastes and ultra-efficient combined heat and power generation from forestry and agricultural arisings. We will be looking for further limits on the role of unsustainable biomass power in the Energy Bill and in the legislation that will be needed to implement it.