Forest defenders were stunned and concerned by the European Commission’s recent proposal for a 12-month delay in implementation of the EU’s new law to reduce global deforestation and forest degradation.

While the European Parliament must still approve that proposal, forest advocates battling the multibillion-dollar wood pellet industry and other commodity sectors fear that the extra time will give the biomass industry, other commodity suppliers and exporting nations an opportunity to weaken or undermine the law’s current modest requirements.

“I think the biggest threat from a delay is that it’s an excuse to gut the law by giving more time to already aggressive industry opposition,” Heather Hillaker, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in North Carolina, told Mongabay. “With climate change, every month matters when we’re trying to avoid [carbon] emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.”

On Oct. 1, the European Commission, an executive body that proposes new laws for parliamentary consideration, called for a 12-month delay to the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). This wide-ranging law was approved in June 2023 and set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2025. Observers felt blindsided by the recommended delay and called the proposed postponement “a surprise” and “shocking.” Just one week prior, the commission had said there would be no delay to the EUDR.

The law requires commodity suppliers to certify that their goods (soy, coffee, cattle, cocoa, palm oil, rubber and wood products, including industrial-scale wood pellets for energy) are not sourced from forests converted for agricultural use or plantations after Dec. 31, 2020. Goods not properly certified, or found to be causing new deforestation, would be banned from EU import.

“Given the EU’s imports of commodities account for 13-16% of global deforestation, despite representing only 7% of the world’s population, its environmental footprint and consumer influence is disproportionately large,” Stientje van Veldhoven of World Resources Institute Europe, an NGO, said in a statement. “The world’s forests cannot afford another year without stronger protections.”

The 12-month delay could result in around 2,300 square kilometers (888 square miles) of deforestation and 49 megatons of greenhouse gas emissions, according to EU studies.

A host of wood-and-commodities industries and exporting nations including Brazil, Indonesia and the United States have decried the EUDR, for what they describe as onerous certification requirements and too little time to arrange for compliance. The wood pellet industry had requested a 24-month delay.

Wood pellet trade groups in the United States did not respond to Mongabay requests for comment. Nor did the world’s largest pellet makers, U.S.-based Enviva and Great Britain-based Drax — both with multiple large-scale pellet manufacturing plants in the U.S. Southeast, where there are a total of 28 pellet mills.

But Christian Rakos, president of the World Bioenergy Association in Austria, told Mongabay in an email response that “the forest industry of Europe as well as in the USA fully understands that deforestation is no option as it undermines its production ability.” He said no deforestation is taking place in either Europe or the U.S. as a result of tree harvests for wood pellet production.

Rakos added: “The traceability [requirement in the EUDR] is extremely difficult for sawmill byproducts which make up for more than half of U.S. pellet production. If sawdust is collected from several sawmills and then pelletized, how will you be able to tell from which forest plot pellets come? And what is the benefit of knowing if there is no deforestation in the entire fibre basket?”

Daniel Reinemann, senior policy officer at Bioenergy Europe, told Biomass Magazine in August, “One of the biggest challenges in the EUDR implementation is the geolocation requirement. In principle, one should be able to trace a specific batch of products to the specific plot of land from which the material is originating and confirm that this plot of land is not subject to forest degradation or deforestation.

“For bulk products like pellets that are made from mixed residues from sawmills, the geolocation exercise means that you need to connect every single shipment with every possible origin. This creates huge datasets that are passed along the value chain, making the reporting extremely complicated, if not downright impossible.”

Independent media reporting, including by Mongabay, has demonstrated that nearly all feedstock for wood pellets comes not from wood waste and residue — as the industry resolutely claims — but rather from clear-cut forests taken by contract loggers largely from private property in the U.S. and elsewhere. If that is the case, then their pellets could be banned for European import under the EUDR regulation.

“Like many industries across the wider forestry sector, EUDR is a top issue for [our] members,” Elizabeth Woodworth, interim executive director at the U.S. Industrial Pellet Association, told Biomass Magazine. “We are working closely with like-minded associations in the U.S. and EU. The consensus across the industry — as well as among many national governments — is that a delay is needed so all parties have adequate time to address the issues and ensure implementation success.”

Elements of compliance

Debbie Hammel, a forest biomass expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco, told Mongabay that the industry has known for nearly 18 months that the law was coming. Rather than work toward compliance, she said, it has mobilized intense political opposition.

In a May 30 letter to the European Commission obtained by Mongabay, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Trade Representative Katherine Tai urged a delay due to “significant challenges for U.S. producers to comply with the regulation.”

Hammel explained that the EUDR spells out clear parameters that wood pellet makers must follow for compliance, starting with independent loggers who harvest and deliver whole trees to the pellet mills.

“Companies need to provide the name and contact details of the [loggers] upstream from them,” Hammel said. “They must provide product descriptions. They need to provide customs and tariff codes associated with the product. They need to provide the country of origin and the geo-coordinates using global satellite systems of the plots of land where the pellets are sourced. They need to provide land maps and traceability systems to ensure that the product is not causing deforestation or forest degradation.”

When told of specific industry concerns, Hammel said, “All of this information is readily available. It’s all feasible to collect. And the traceability technology is readily available to do this kind of data collection.”

Hammel, who has closely studied the fine print in the EUDR, said she is “impressed with the details,” but added, “Now of course it’s words on paper, and there is a lot of work to do in terms of how this is actually going to get implemented in practice.

“If there is a big hole, it’s that there’s a whole range of other activities that degrade forests. Converting them to plantations is some of the worst things you can do (for biodiversity protection and carbon sequestration). But there are other management practices that contribute to the degradation of natural forests, and this regulation won’t address them in its current form.”

EU public subsidies to burn forests for energy

Martin Pigeon, a forest biomass and climate campaigner with Fern, an NGO in Belgium, told Mongabay that the EUDR is crucial because voluntary compliance with EU regulations that call for sustainable practices in wood harvesting by pellet producers are currently difficult to certify.

He noted, too, that if the EUDR is implemented as written, it could lead to transparency issues, economic conflicts of interest and even regulatory contradictions: “We will have an interesting situation where EU energy companies will be able to receive public subsidies for burning [forest] biomass feedstocks [that] they’re not allowed to buy on the EU market [because of EUDR], but may do so anyway.”

The EU currently offers major subsidies to private companies running power plants that burn wood pellets to make energy because, under current policy, those facilities allegedly produce zero emissions at the smokestack, an assumption scientific research has proved erroneous, but which industry and EU member states defend.

Pigeon said EUDR could prove protective in Scandinavia, where its northernmost boreal forests “have some of the highest rates of deforestation in the world.”

In the Netherlands, a top EU consumer of wood pellets for energy, biomass activist Fenna Swart with the Dutch Clean Air Committee told Mongabay that newly elected conservative members of the European Commission have been hostile to a range of environmental regulations, from pesticide control to the EUDR at a perilous time for the Earth.

Swart, a forest campaigner, pointed to the Oct. 8 release of the 2024 Forest Declaration Assessment, an independent review of major forest protection pledges made since 2014 by nearly all the nations on Earth — mostly broken pledges. This review shows that signees are falling disturbingly short of reaching their voluntary goals by 2030. Deforestation and forest degradation continue increasing throughout the world without legally binding limits.

“This trend not only pushes the achievement of 2030 forest conservation targets even further out of reach,” Swart said, “it makes the postponement of the [legally binding] EUDR totally absurd.”

In anticipation of the European Parliament approving the delay (a vote is expected at the Nov. 13-14 plenary session), Swart said forest campaigners like herself are developing strategies to lobby for stronger regulations in the EUDR, even as the pellet industry, other corporate interests and exporting nations possibly call for less stringent modifications.

“We do not expect that this law will be set in motion unchanged; others are already working to weaken it,” Swart said. “But we want to sharpen it, make it more ambitious and make it more understandable to the public. We intend to rally public support. That will be our focus.”

Banner image: This 52-acre site in Edenton, North Carolina, was clear-cut over the course of two weeks in late October and early November 2022, with about half the trees ground into chips and trucked to a nearby Enviva wood pellet plant in Ahoskie. The remaining trees were sent to nearby sawmills. Image courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

Justin Catanoso, a regular contributor to Mongabay, is a professor of journalism at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He will be covering the United Nations biodiversity summit, COP16, in Cali, Colombia, in late October.

EU woody biomass final policy continues threatening forests and climate: Critics

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