Category: Threat

The UK’s plan to get to net zero relies on Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) – burning trees or energy crops and capturing the carbon. The UK Government and Climate Change Committee think the UK will need lots of BECCS to reach net zero.

The UK Government has recently consulted on extending subsidies for bioenergy companies – worth billions of pounds – from 2027 into the 2030s, because those companies have promised to deliver Bioenergy Carbon Capture technology.

But research shows that the UK doesn’t need BECCS electricity to achieve net zero – it can do it without it as long as it is effective at reducing emissions from other sectors.

And BECCS doesn’t help reduce emissions anyway. It only looks like it provides a climate benefit if you completely ignore the impact on the forest. But two independent studies show that if you take into account the impact on stores of carbon in forests then BECCS actually increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Any CO2 captured at the power station is more than outweighed by stopping the forest from absorbing CO2 for decades.

BECCS would also be incredibly expensive – Ember thinktank estimates that a BECCS plant at Drax would need up to £43 billion of subsidies over its 25 year lifetime.

Biomass Subsidies Undermine Climate Action and a Green Recovery

Successive UK Governments have said they want to lead the world in tackling the climate emergency and protecting nature, but billions in subsidies for dirty biomass electricity directly undermine these plans.

In 2025 the UK Government announced that it will be extending subsidies for large biomass power plants like Drax after current contracts end in 2027. This will mean billions more in subsidies for biomass burning.

Biomass Harms Forest Ecosystems

Forests are among the most biodiverse places on the planet, providing homes for countless species.

Wood used to produce biomass energy in the UK is logged using destructive and unsustainable practices like clearcutting. On-the-ground investigations into Enviva, the world’s largest wood pellet manufacturer and a top biomass supplier for Drax Power Station, routinely show wood from clearcuts of mature hardwood forests being used to make pellets.

Clearcutting is even occurring in reserves designed to protect forests and rare and threatened species (e.g., European Union’s Natura 2000 network). Once a forest has been clearcut, it takes decades, if not centuries, before it can regrow to recover its original level of ecosystem productivity.

The scale of the impact is alarming. In 2024, approximately 5.8 million metric tons of wood pellets were exported from the United States to the UK to feed just a portion of the UK’s demand for biomass, requiring the clearing of an area larger than the New Forest. Each year, over a million acres of Canadian boreal forest are clearcut, in part to feed biomass demand. And between 2001 and 2019, Estonia’s Natura 2000 areas lost an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, due in part to biomass production.

Biomass Harms Wildlife

The forests being logged for biomass are some of the most ecologically rich and diverse in the world.

The North American Coastal Plain—where most UK biomass imports come from—is a global biodiversity hotspot, providing habitat for hundreds of imperiled species, including the red wolf, cerulean warbler, and Louisiana black bear.

In Canada, logging for biomass is putting an additional strain on imperiled species like the Woodland Caribou, Canada Lynx, and pine marten. It’s also jeopardizing the over 3 billion birds that rely on the boreal for nesting and breeding, many of which are classified as “threatened with extinction by” the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Biomass is likewise adding pressure to log the last remaining old growth forests in Estonia and Latvia, which are critical for biodiversity conservation. These forests have experienced few major human impacts over the years and are thus unique local biodiversity hotspots, supporting species that cannot survive elsewhere like flying squirrels, capercaillie, and black stork. Many of these species are protected under national and/or EU legislation.

The Lithuanian government now allows logging in regional and national forest parks to meet biomass demand, despite their protected status, impacting many bird species listed as endangered in Lithuania’s Red Data Book like the Pygmy Owl, White-tailed Eagle, Black Grouse, and White-backed Woodpecker and prompting criticism from the European Commission.

Biomass Breaks the UK’s Promises on Biodiversity

The UK’s massive biomass electricity subsidies break its promises under the Convention on Biological Diversity requiring the elimination of subsidies harmful to international biodiversity.

It’s also hypocritical for the UK to commit to—and lead—the effort to protect at least 30% of its lands and seas by 2030 (an effort known as “30 by 30”) under the Convention on Biological Diversity when, through billions in subsidies for biomass, it is destroying other countries’ abilities to meet these targets.

The country’s reliance on biomass for industrial scale electricity generation is also incompatible with its 25-year Environment Plan, which states that the UK will establish “appropriate mechanisms to screen policies and strategies for potential negative environmental effects overseas.”

Pellet mills emit hazardous or toxic air pollutants that are known to cause cancer and other serious health impacts even at relatively small amounts. A 2018 report by the Environmental Integrity Project found that 21 wood pellet mills exporting to the European Union emit thousands of tons of fine particulate matter or PM2.5 (fine dust), carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides (smog), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) every year, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency associates with illnesses ranging from respiratory and heart disease to cancer to slowed lung function in children.

While each of these pollutants has serious health or environmental impacts, PM2.5 is especially harmful to human health, causing up to 200,000 excess deaths in the United States every year. PM2.5 consists of tiny airborne particles that can pass deep into a person’s lungs and even into the bloodstream, causing heart attacks, decreased lung function, worsening asthma symptoms, and leading to premature death, especially among people of color. In Northampton County, North Carolina, where the world’s largest pellet producer, Enviva, owns a pellet mill, more than one in ten adults suffered from asthma in 2018 and residents describe a constant cloud of dust flowing from the plant onto their homes, cars, gardens, and into their lungs.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) found that African Americans who live near biomass power plants are more likely to suffer from increased exposure to many dangerous emissions, such as smog, asbestos, sulfur dioxide, and other toxins, than any other racial group in America. For this reason, several southern chapters of the NAACP opposed the siting of wood pellet production facilities in their communities, with one Georgia chapter stating that the siting of such a facility in their community was “a clear cut example of environmental racism.”

“Most of these facilities, they come into areas like mine: Black neighborhoods where people, they just aren’t going to fight. They’re tired of fighting over and over and over.”

—Rev. Richie Harding, founder of Gaston Youth

Despite these horrible health impacts on nearby communities, one-third of pellet mills in the U.S. South were in violation of emissions limitations set in their permits in 2017, according to the Environmental Integrity Project report. In fact, violations of air quality laws have resulted in numerous enforcement actions, fines, and community-led lawsuits against pellet mills in the U.S. Southeast. For example, Drax has been cited for serious air quality violations at all three of its U.S. pellet mills and was fined $2.5 million dollars at one of these mills for air pollution three times above the legal limit.

The logging of forests around the pellet mills is also concerning because of the critical ecosystem services the trees provide to surrounding communities. Trees remove nutrients and other pollutants from water, meaning logging is negatively impacting water quality in marginalized communities. Intensive logging in these areas also leaves nearby communities more vulnerable to increasingly frequent extreme weather events caused by climate change.

“I use the term dumping ground to describe our area…We’re predominantly Black, and big industries just feel they can do what they want.”

Belinda Joyner, a 72-year-old local activist fighting the biomass industry in Northampton County, North Carolina

Forests—particularly wetland forests like the ones being logged for biomass in the U.S. Southeast—act as storm buffers, shielding communities from floods and hurricanes. Without these trees, nearby communities are unprotected. For example, Northampton County residents say that two-inch rains now spike flood waters as much as a four-inch rain did a decade ago. Reports from the Cape Fear River—downstream from Enviva’s Sampson, North Carolina, plant—have reported similar findings, with local river guide Charles Robbins stating: “The storms are getting stronger, yes, but there’s also a lot fewer trees to pull water from the river.”

Burning Biomass for Electricity Emits Heat-Trapping CO₂ at Every Step

The climate impacts of harvesting and burning biomass from forests in power stations are well established. In addition to the large supply chain emissions in processing and transporting wood pellets to the UK from overseas forests, all biomass power plants emit more CO2 from their stacks than coal plants do per unit of electricity. This means that bioenergy, which the UK treats as a “zero emitting” source of electricity, actually increases CO2 in the atmosphere.

Bioenergy proponents argue that forest regrowth negates this harmful impact on our climate. That is simply not true, even under the best-case scenario in which new trees are immediately replanted to replace those that have been logged.

This is for three reasons:

1. Older trees absorb more carbon dioxide than younger ones. Cutting down old trees and burning them, and replacing them with young trees, leaves the forest absorbing less carbon than before. Overall the climate is worse off. Not only will it take years (likely decades) for the new tree to reach the size of the felled one, but during that time the now felled tree would have grown even larger if it had been left in place.
2. It is difficult to ensure that harvested trees will be replaced and kept intact.
3. Forest harvesting also releases carbon from the soil.

Together, this means that harvesting biomass from forests for energy has an immediate and negative impact on the climate, with consequences that can persist for decades or even centuries. Even when biomass energy is generated by burning genuine forestry residues—the leftovers from logging operations, like tree tops and limbs—the result is increased CO2 in the atmosphere over several decades. This is time we simply do not have if we are going to avert the worse consequences of climate change.

Biomass Undermines the UK’s Plans to Lead on Climate Action

Britain’s COP 26 President Alok Sharma says climate change is the biggest challenge of our time, and that the UK’s presidency offers a unique opportunity to address this. Yet the UK is actively undermining this ambition and worsening the climate crisis by continuing billions in subsidies for dirty biomass electricity—the opposite of global leadership.

The UK cannot claim the mantle of global climate leadership while it remains the world’s largest market for burning trees for energy. Continuing to subsidise wood-burning for electricity puts the country’s climate goals in jeopardy. The UK government must immediately redirect billions in dirty biomass electricity subsidies to true clean energy like wind and solar.