Translation of "Non-commercial forest biomass " (English → French) :

Encourages the Member States and the Commission to promote the importance of sustainable forest management, and hence the key role of forest biomass as one of the EU’s crucial renewable raw materials for reaching its energy targets; draws attention to the increasing demand for forest biomass, which means that sustainable forest management, in line with the EU forest strategy, should be even further strengthened and promoted, as it is crucial for biodiversity and the ecosystem function of forests, including the absorption of CO from t ...[+++]he atmosphere; points out the need, therefore, for balanced exploitation of resources grown in the EU and imported from third countries, bearing in mind the very long regeneration time required for wood.

- Explore and promote the use of wood as a sustainable, renewable, climate and environment-friendly raw material more fully without damaging the forests and their ecosystem services; assess the climate benefits of material and energy substitution by forest biomass and harvested wood products and the effect of incentives for using forest biomass in creating market distortions;

For this strategy to be meaningful to those policies that require or might require evidence of sustainable forest management and to reach its goals, objective, ambitious and demonstrable sustainable forest management criteria that could be applied to all uses of forest biomass are needed.

whereas existing legal instruments on forest management set up a sufficient framework to provide the proof of sustainability of forest biomass produced within the European Union;

Some recent proposals also aim at setting criteria which will be useful for GPP, such as the proposal for a revision of the Ecodesing for energy-using products Directive, which provides for the setting of both minimum requirements and advanced performance benchmarks, the proposal for a Directive on the promotion of clean and energy efficient vehicles[9] which establishes a harmonised methodology for calculating the lifetime cost of pollutant emissions and fuel consumption and the proposal for a Directive on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources[10] which includes sustainability criteria for biofuels and bioliquids and may involve –in future- the setting up of sustainability criteria for biomass ...[+++], including forest biomass.

In general, incentives to forest harvesting should help mobilise more unused forest biomass for all users.