Region Archives: International

Dana Neilson

Price for a New Zealand unit (NZU, is equivalent to 1 ton of CO2) reached a record $47. But according to Dennis Neilsen, the head of DANA NZ Limited, the price of NZU could soar to $140 within three years. This will inexorably lead to an increase in the price of forestlands. At this height, it will be much more profitable to grow forests than to make lumber out of it. Dennis Neilsen: This is a new field in most countries, but a growing field with growing interest from investors. …However, there is only one country in the world, which has a government law and regulations related to carbon-offset estimates of carbon credits. That is New Zealand.  The EU has the largest government regulated ETS trading scheme in the world, but it deliberately bans the use of trees to offset carbon. 

LONDON — Companies looking to offset their climate-warming emissions can have a bigger impact backing governments’ initiatives to halt forest destruction rather than planting new trees, an environmental group said. Demand is growing for carbon offset credits, prompting some of the world’s biggest corporations to announce tree-planting initiatives. But a policy paper authored by Emergent, a U.S.-based non-profit partnered with organisations including the United Nations Environment Programme, argued that those efforts still fall far short of what is needed. …Currently, companies mainly buy carbon credits for relatively small individual projects, many of which focus on tree planting, that make it easy to tie their investments to specific results. …Few effective mechanisms allowing companies to back government efforts are available… So Emergent wants to establish a marketplace for carbon offset credits linked to government-led tropical forest conservation initiatives.

The European Commission unveiled its new forest strategy – including a commitment to plant at least three billion additional trees in the EU over the next decade to boost natural greenhouse gas removals. In the EU, forests account for about 38 percent of the total land surface. …However, extreme weather events and the increasing demand for forest services and products, driven by wood-based bioenergy and international trade, has accelerated tree-cover loss in the last decade. The new strategy recognises the importance of forests in the fight against climate change – but also their role in the renewable energy mix of the EU – of which wood-based bioenergy is the main source. However, for the first time, the commission has warned that increasing harvesting for long-lived wood products is unlikely to compensate for the reduction of the net carbon sink associated, urging member states to pay attention to “this risk”.

The European Union is fleshing out the part of its climate plan to absorb more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and promote biodiversity through the use of forests. The bloc is proposing to use the Common Agricultural Policy to set up payment schemes for the owners of woodland, while boosting the monitoring of existing forest, which makes up around two-fifths of the continent. The European Commission, the EU’s regulator, is also planning to plant 3 billion trees in an effort to absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere. Lobbyists for the timber industry are already pushing back, wary of what the stronger restrictions might mean for the 640 billion-euro ($756 billion) industry that employs about 3.6 million people. Tension had been building already after scientists at the Commission’s Joint Research Centre warned that growing demand for timber products risk derailing Europe’s climate goals by damaging an important carbon sink.

Bioenergy Europe has welcomed the launch of the European Commission’s ‘Fit for 55’ package, establishing a series of proposals aimed at fostering the EU’s race towards 55% greenhouse gas emission reductions by 2030, but warned that the Commission has ignored several of its ‘red flags’ regarding the biomass sector. Bioenergy Europe supports the objectives the package is trying to achieve, although it regrets that the new framework for bioenergy is ‘poorly designed’. The Fit-for-55 package creates a top-down approach that makes it harder for EU Member States to achieve a renewable future. It contains ‘burdensome retroactive measures’ that will be especially punitive to small and medium-sized enterprises, which are the pillars of the local economies in rural areas, said Bioenergy Europe. These retroactive measures could prevent the penetration of renewables and keep the EU on a trajectory of heavy fossil fuel use.

The European Commission on July 14 adopted a package of proposals that aim to reduce net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030 when compared to 1990 levels. Among the proposals are those related to forestry, renewable energy and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). One of these proposals, the Regulation on Land Use, Forestry and Agriculture, sets a overall European Union target for carbon removals by natural sinks, equivalent to 310 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. National targets will require member states to care for and expand their carbon sinks to meet this target. By 2035, the EU should aim to reach climate neutrality in the land use, forestry and agriculture sectors …  According to the EC, it supports foresters and the forest-based bioeconomy while keeping harvesting and biomass use sustainable, preserving biodiversity, and setting a plan to plan 3 billion trees across Europe by 2030. 

…Stretching across eleven time zones, Russia has the largest area of forest on the planet, with more than a fifth of the world’s trees. New research has found that, as those trees grow faster in a warmer world and edge northward into the Arctic tundra, they are grabbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere faster than any previous estimates would suggest. Most years, it turns out, Russia’s boreal forests take up more carbon than is being lost to deforestation across the whole of the tropics. It is, of course, good news for the global climate that nature is in overdrive in the great wilderness of Siberia. But climate scientists are increasingly concerned that there is a downside, too. …The new data, collected with the help of several Russian forest research institutes, suggests the scale of the offset that Russia — the world’s fourth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning — could declare.

Forest fires are already a global threat. “But considering how climate change is progressing, we are probably only at the beginning of a future that will see more and bigger forest fires,” explains Rupert Seidl, Professor of Ecosystem Dynamics and Forest Management in Mountain Landscapes at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). …”The interaction between climate, forest fires, and other processes in the forest ecosystem is very complex, and sophisticated process-based simulation models are required to take account of the different interactions appropriately,” explains Prof. Seidl. TUM is using artificial intelligence to significantly expand the field of use of these complex models. …The simulations completed by the team of scientists include simulations for the “Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem” …Depending on the climate change scenario, the study has found that by the end of the century, the current forest coverage will have disappeared in 28 to 59 percent of the region.

A major political and environmental dispute is heating up as the forestry industry and governments promote forest biomass … to make electricity. They claim the science shows biomass to be sustainable, with the energy produced resulting in zero emissions. Forest advocates and many researchers sit squarely on the other side of the argument, providing evidence that forest biomass is destructive to forests and biodiversity, is dirtier than coal, and destabilizing for the climate. Moreover, they say, the carbon neutrality claim is an error that will greatly increase carbon emissions. These diverging viewpoints are colliding this week as the European Commission wrangles with revisions to its legally binding Renewable Energy Directive, with recommendations to the European parliament due July 14, Analysts say the EU rules counting biomass as carbon neutral are unlikely to change. Mongabay provides a review of the science on both sides of the forest biomass debate…

Nordic countries have registered near-record temperatures over the weekend, including highs of 34C (93.2F) in some places. The latest figures came after Finland’s national meteorological institute registered its hottest temperature for June since records began in 1844. Kevo, in Lapland, recorded heat of 33.6C (92.5F) on Sunday, the hottest day since 1914 when authorities registered 34.7C (94.5F), said the STT news agency. Several parts of Sweden also reported record highs for June. The high temperatures follow the record-breaking heatwave and wildfires that have caused devastation in parts of North America. The intense heatwave has killed 95 people in the US state of Oregon alone, its governor said on Sunday. Hundreds are believed to have died from the heat in the US north-west and south-western Canada. Experts and officials fear that the catastrophic conditions, fuelled by the climate crisis, will only get worse through the coming months.