I return from the Kinship Conservation Fellowship program with a new appreciation for the global nature of environmental problems, the diverse tools used to achieve conservation success as well as many great new friends from my wonderfully diverse cohort.
Dogwood Alliance is proud to be a part of the People’s Climate March, joining world leaders in New York City for a UN summit on the climate crisis. With our future on the line and the whole world watching, tens of thousands of people from every imaginable background will take to the streets and demand the world we want is within our reach.
The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) released its long-awaited Biomass Emissions and Counterfactual Model Calculator and an accompanying report Lifecycle Impacts of Biomass in 2020 report. The findings from the tool and associated report confirm what U.S. and European ENGOs have been claiming for the last few years – that burning forests for electricity is bad for our climate.
Burning the forests that are supposed to be our best defense against climate change to protect us against climate change has to be one of the most ridiculous ideas I’ve ever heard. Yet over the last few years, Europe has wholeheartedly embraced this false solution to climate change, and we’ve seen a dramatic increase in logging in the Southern US to fuel European demand. Along the way, the US South has become the largest wood pellet export region in the world.
Not only does clearcutting US forests, turning them into pellets, and shipping them to Europe to be burned for electricity have a grievous cost for our climate, but it also destroys the habitat of the South’s rich and biodiverse plant and animal ecosystems.
