More than 70 civil society organisations wrote to the European Commission on Friday 9 April to express their dismay at the criteria for forestry and bioenergy in the draft delegated act on EU taxonomy that was recently leaked to the press.
According to these organisations, the leaked text (see EUROPE 12684/3) would allow almost all current forestry to be defined as “green” and the burning of forest biomass for energy purposes to be defined as sustainable.
In particular, they criticise the fact that for holdings of less than 25 hectares, the criteria state that no climate benefit analysis is required to claim that forestry makes a substantial contribution to climate change mitigation under the taxonomy, whereas around “2/3 of EU forest owners have holdings of less than 3 hectares”.
As the delegated act is due to be officially unveiled on 21 April, the signatory organisations consider that it is too late to discuss these criteria again, and that the only solution is therefore to remove forestry and bioenergy from the delegated act, in order to give more time to the formation of “scientifically credible” criteria and thus avoid turning the EU taxonomy into “an actual greenwashing tool”.
See the letter: https://bit.ly/3seAOqy (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)