UK "Sustainability" Plan Now Includes Importing Wood Pellets From Afghanistan, The Maldives & North Korea
A plan by the British government to burn biomass imported from countries including North Korea and Afghanistan has been described as “bonkers”, with critics saying it undermines the credibility of the UK’s climate strategy. A bioenergy resource model, published in late summer, calculates that only a big expansion in the import of energy crops and wood from a surprising list of nations would satisfy the UK’s plan to meet net zero.
The government wants biomass to play a “significant role” in decarbonising all sectors of the economy in the years leading up to 2050, and has provided more than £20bn to businesses using it in the power and heat sectors over the past two decades. About a third of the biomass used in the UK is imported. In 2021, 9.1m tonnes of wood pellets for use in energy production came from abroad – about 76% from North America and 18% from the EU. But there is not enough wood in these regions to supply the large expansion in bioenergy that the government is banking on.
The resource model sets out potential domestic and overseas sources of bioenergy. Only the most ambitious scenario outlined in the document would theoretically provide enough biomass to meet this demand, and it involves a huge increase in imports. According to an assessment by Mary Booth, director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, this includes a list of countries that seem “improbable” as sources of significant volumes of agricultural and forestry biomass, including North Korea, Afghanistan, Bhutan and the Maldives.
Booth criticised the way the model addresses changes in land use, and its assumption that energy crop area will increase exponentially globally and crop yields will increase by more than 50%. “This is all against a background of increasing climate change when whole regions are facing famine due to weather-induced crop failures,” she said. “It’s bonkers.” As well as being unclear whether such a large volume of biomass would be available to the UK, the model does not attempt to explain how existing deforestation problems in countries such as Brazil or the lack of transparency in a dictatorship such as North Korea would comply with sustainability rules.
EDIT
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/09/anger-uk-plan-net-zero-import-biomass-fuel-north-korea