There’s a story going around that a load of Tasmanian specialty timber shipped to Finland a year or two ago for the fit-out of the Spirit of Tasmania ferries had to be returned here (presumably aboard Spirit IV) along with the delivery supervisor, when for some reason the fit-out couldn’t be done.
The story came from a friend who’d heard it from his hairdresser who’d heard it from… well, it’s a rumour. However, over 6000 lineal metres of celery-top pine salvaged from under the waters of the Lake Pieman impoundment did get sent to Finland to be used as feature wall cladding on the new ships.
One explanation for the celery-top story is this: Tasmanian native forestry has failed multiple audits by the Forest Stewardship Council, a global non-profit promoting responsible forest management, and the timber was stopped at the border because it lacked the European standard of FSC certification.
Whatever actually happened, the timber will no doubt all end up in the two new ferries, and amid all the many Spirit mishaps and Tasmania’s unprecedented financial troubles this is a mere hiccup. It’s even less significant alongside the global-sized stuff-ups in play in the world of wood everywhere – including Finland.
Within three weeks the 30th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-30) begins in Belem, an old colonial city on the edge of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. The country’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, wants this COP – 10 years on from Paris – to be another “landmark summit”, this time highlighting forests’ critical role in stopping global warming.
The Lula government recognises the parlous state of the Amazon rainforest in its COP-30 goals, including the utopian aim of “global mutirão”, or collective global action, which it says is based on Indigenous Amazonian values. It seeks to bring this spirit into “a global movement capable of delivering real-world results at the pace the climate crisis demands”.
Central to Brazil’s agenda is the “Tropical Forests Forever Facility” (TFFF), a performance-based fund supported by the UK, Norway and BRICS nations – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. TFFF aims to mobilise $4 billion a year to reward countries for conserving tropical forests at the annual rate of $4 per hectare – at least a fifth of it earmarked for Indigenous and local communities.
The good news ends there. Clearing Amazonian rainforest for livestock farming and cropping – one crop being bioenergy feedstock – is continuing apace. That includes removal of virgin forest on tens of thousands of hectares for construction of a four-lane highway to “modernise” Belem ahead of the arrival of the COP delegate horde.
Last week Brazil launched an initiative to win high-level support in COP-30 for bioenergy, including quadrupling by 2035 the production and use of what it (along with other governments) chooses to call “sustainable fuels”. Some sources are sustainable, like municipal and agricultural waste, but by far the greatest biomass volume comes from wood.
Bioenergy proponents talk of a new “bioeconomy” while calling for the use of a finite resource to serve huge, competing and ever-growing demands. We really have no idea what a bioeconomy would look like, but in most cases it will deplete natural forests, increase the biodiversity crisis, raise (not lower) carbon emissions and encourage avoidance of climate action.
Once again, the Belem bioenergy push exposes the huge, decades-old hole in UN carbon accounting allowing industry and government a rationale for arguing that burning ostensibly replaceable wood in huge volumes for energy is better than burning coal. In reality it’s at best no cleaner than coal and usually dirtier.
UNFCCC accounting rules allow governments to treat biomass energy as carbon-neutral. Under these rules, emissions from bioenergy are accounted for where the wood is harvested, in the land sector – the complete opposite of fossil fuel emissions which are measured where the fuel is burned.
Carbon accounting gets really tricky if you import a lot of your wood from another country. In the case of Europe, most of that wood comes from North America, where whole forests are disappearing to feed Europe’s bioenergy demands.
The International Energy Agency calculates that after the US, the world’s largest source of wood for bioenergy is Brazil, home of COP-30. The largest European user of biomass energy is Germany, while per person the continent’s top consumer is Finland, where the leading voice against bioenergy is a group called Ei Polteta Tulevaisuutta, translating to “Let’s not burn our future”.
Ship stories get forgotten after a while, but there’s no escaping responsibility for global warming.