In response to industry plans to develop eucalyptus plantations across the US South[1], environmental groups[2] are raising serious concerns about the impacts of eucalyptus plantations on forests, rural communities, wildlife and the climate.
Exciting news! In late October, KFC released a new sustainable packaging policy that we can get behind. We’ve been studying the implications of the policy and talking with the company’s biggest suppliers to ensure that there’s real change on the ground for our forests. After much analysis, we are now confident that it will.
Today we released “The Use of Whole Trees in Wood Pellet Manufacturing,” a report documenting that the top exporters of wood pellets in the region rely heavily on whole trees, i.e. cutting down trees to be burnt in European power stations. According to Wood Resources International, the Southern US is now the world’s largest exporter of wood pellets to Europe. The report discredits European energy companies’ claims that wood pellets burned in UK power stations are produced from wood waste and residues. Over the next 5-10 years, burning wood in large power stations – both new-build biomass power stations but increasingly also converted coal power stations – is expected to attract several billion pounds of public subsidies annually in the UK.
EPA’s Decision Not to Regulate Carbon Emissions from Biomass Puts Climate, Forests and Human Health at Risk
Further Expansion of Industrial Scale Wood Burning Facilities Needs to Be Stopped While EPA Studies the Environmental Impacts
At the launch of the High Level segment of the UN Forum on Forests today, Mr. Sha Zhukan, UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs will declare 2011 “the International Year of Forests.” Civil society groups advocating forest protection, Indigenous Rights, and climate justice are launching a program called “The Future of Forests,” to ensure that forest protection strategies address the real causes of global forest decline, and are not oriented toward markets or profit-making.
