Burning wood ‘could be worse for the climate than coal’

Turning our green and pleasant land into forest will damage wildlife as well as local communities

BURNING wood from forests for energy could be worse for the climate than coal, the Government has been warned, after the practice was recommended by its net zero advisory body.

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) called for subsidies to support the expansion of forest cover across the UK as part of its plan to meet its legally binding net-zero target. It said some forests could be used “sustainably for combustion and carbon sequestration in the energy sector”.

But Duncan Brack, a forestry policy specialist at the Chatham House thinktank, said using forests for renewable energy was “almost certainly counterproductive” and claims that cutting down trees to create energy was carbon neutral were “highly dubious”.

Last year biomass production provided 12 per cent of UK electricity.

Claims that trees are a carbon neutral energy source assume emissions created when they burn are matched by planting new ones.

But older trees absorb carbon at a much greater rate, and carbon capture potential is lost when they are replaced by young trees.

Mr Brack’s views were supported by forestry NGO Fern, which said burning wood for energy could be “worse for the climate than burning coal, expensive and harmful to human health”.

Mr Brack suggested biomass subsidies would be better used for forestry expansion and conservation. He added that biomass could play a role in renewable energy, depending on its source. Using grassland crops and short rotation coppice, which the CCC recommends, could be a greener alternative.

Who doesn’t like trees? There are certainly worse things for politicians to blow our money on. The Government’s climate change advisers want farmers to plant 100 million of them a year. Even Donald Trump has signed the US up to the World Economic Forum’s one-trilliontrees initiative. On (sustainably produced) paper, it looks a good plan: plant trees to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and avoid at least some of the more difficult choices that Greta’s dream of a carbon-neutral planet will entail. Yet I can’t help feeling a nagging unease about this newfound enthusiasm for silviculture.

Where I live in Galloway we have been on the receiving end of successive governments’ tree anxiety ever since the strategic geniuses in Whitehall decreed in 1919 that there would always be a need for pit props and timber for trench construction and founded the Forestry Commission.

In the century since, the hills have been blanketed in monocultures of alien species such as the Sitka spruce. These pristine rows of conifers aren’t how most people picture British woodland, and they are a disaster for wildlife. As a result of planting them we have all but lost the black grouse, the curlew and the golden plover. Planting to maximise growth and lock up carbon steers foresters towards faster growing non-native trees at commercial densities – a far cry from the “rewilding” dream.

The current wave of tree planting we are already experiencing, encouraged by the SNP, is upsetting the natives with its echoes of the “clearances” – a word loaded with folk-trauma in Scotland. Shepherds and gamekeepers are being laid off and communities broken up, to be replaced by yet more holiday homes, as landowners reluctantly do the maths, assess agriculture post-brexit and, with heavy hearts, sell to the forestry companies. The estate agents are valuing planting land in the hills at up to £3,000 per acre, double what it was two years ago.

We have planted a large number of trees over the years on our farm. But looking at them standing alongside our fields, I can’t be sure that they are growing any more organic matter each year than the grass. That is important, because organic matter is where the carbon sucked out of the atmosphere is stored.

Admittedly, we have some of the best grass-growing country in the world here: 16 tons of dry matter per hectare in a growing season is not uncommon. Conifers yield an average of perhaps 16-20 tons per hectare each year over a 35-year cycle. This equation is complicated by the fact that pasture stores more carbon under the sward than trees, and when it pulls carbon and nitrogen down into the soil it does so invisibly and in a way that is harder to quantify. If the Government starts tearing up grassland to plant new “greenwash” trees, the net carbon sequestered might not be as fantastic as it seems. Particularly if those trees are planted to excuse the flights of the great and good as they jet between climate emergency summits.

Certainly the benefits may be marginal enough to make us pause before turning green and pleasant land

Follow Jamie Blackett on Twitter @ Jamie_blackett; read more at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion into forest and exporting our food production to other countries that do not grow it in the carbon-friendly way British livestock farmers do. Or to think carefully before dramatically changing the landscape of the Lake District, say, into something resembling the Kielder Forest to its east. Or to question turning rural economies that offer regular yearround employment on the land into gig economies where there are fewer jobs in the forestry gangs.

Then there is ye olde British wild wood myth. Sure, there were many more trees before Iron Age man invented the axe. But there must have been large open areas as well, otherwise many of our ground nesting birds, which will not nest near trees, would not have survived to this day. Birds like the curlew will face extinction if we are not careful to preserve our moorland as it is, artificial as that habitat may seem to so-called environmentalists.

Done properly, planting forests can be a wonderful thing. Just please don’t blindly expect them to solve all of the planet’s problems.

Jamie Blackett is the author of ‘Red Rag to a Bull, Rural Life in an Urban Age’ (Quiller)