- The sustainability certification of forest biomass produced to generate industrial-scale energy has long been controversial and called into question.
- Wood pellet companies argue their product is sustainable and doesn’t cause deforestation, while governments claim biomass burning results in climate-neutral emissions, which is why they offer subsides to energy companies burning sustainability certified forest biomass.
- However, forest advocates and scientists have provided significant evidence that forest biomass production contributes to deforestation, is not sustainable and that burning wood generates more carbon emissions per unit of energy than coal.
- In an unprecedented move, Dutch law enforcement is considering a criminal investigation into RWE, one of the Netherlands’ largest energy providers, after a Dutch forest advocate alleged that the firm dodges biomass certification rules, using wood pellets imported from Malaysia sourced not from sawmill waste, but allegedly from whole trees.
For years, a battle has raged between EU nations that claim their forest biomass certification policies safeguard against deforestation, promote sustainability and enable carbon-emissions reductions, even as forest advocates have argued that those policies fail to combat climate change, are badly flawed or outright fraudulent.
EU policymakers remain entrenched today, defending their certification schemes as a means of complying with laws to stop burning coal and for achieving national net-zero goals, despite evidence that burning wood pellets to make energy is dirtier than coal.
But now forest advocates are turning up the pressure in the Netherlands in an unprecedented way. In a possible first-of-its-kind action, the Dutch Public Prosecution Service is considering a criminal investigation against RWE, one of the Netherlands’ largest energy providers.
RWE faces allegations made by two forest advocacy groups that the company, which has collected billions of euros in Dutch biomass subsidies, misrepresented itself by claiming that hundreds of thousands of tons of wood pellets imported from Malaysia came entirely from sawmill waste.
The two advocacy groups, Comite Schone Lucht and Biofuelwatch, say their research establishes that those pellets come mostly from whole trees, contributing to Malaysian deforestation. The Public Prosecution Service, the sole authority responsible for investigating and prosecuting Dutch criminal offenses, is expected to decide how to proceed by the end of March.
The potential investigation came at the behest of the Dutch National Environmental Crime Team, which tracks industry and government practices that may contribute to environmental degradation at home and abroad. The crime team has requested that the Netherlands-based Comite Schone Lucht file a criminal complaint against RWE based on its research into what it says are violations of national and EU policies regarding wood-pellet certification. Comite Schone Lucht is joined in its efforts by United Kingdom-based Biofuelwatch.
“The Public Prosecution Service has already held its first meeting and confirmed that it takes these alleged violations very seriously,” Fenna Swart, the leader of Comite Schone Lucht, told Mongabay. “Given the significant political sensitivity and its potentially far-reaching implications — not only for the Netherlands but also for EU climate policy — they are keen to handle the matter with utmost care.”
Multinational RWE, headquartered in Germany, is among the three largest Dutch energy producers. It gets 15% of its capacity from burning wood pellets imported from Asia, Eastern Europe and the United States. The company confirms that one of its larger power plants located 130 kilometers (80 miles) from Amsterdam burns only wood pellets, having entirely phased out coal there as required by law.
RWE told Mongabay in writing that it is, and always has been, in full compliance with Dutch and EU biomass certification policies.
A company spokesperson wrote that through January 2026, “RWE only used Category 5 biomass in its power plants, in accordance with Dutch sustainability requirements. All certificates are in place, to demonstrate this, and it has been confirmed by the investigations by the Dutch emissions authority, which was published in January.”
Category 5 biomass are wood pellets made only from sawmill residues — not whole trees. Those pellets are exempt from more stringent certification requirements, especially in the Netherlands.
Wood pellets, a government necessity or not?
Biomass burning grew to be a multibillion-dollar industry and significant energy source following the adoption of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (with EU ratification in 2002) which classified the burning of wood as a renewable energy source equal to zero-carbon wind and solar.
Energy companies, encouraged by billions in state subsidies, shifted away from coal to wood pellets, which they touted as a significant climate mitigation and emissions-reduction strategy.
“The use of sustainable biomass is climate neutral,” RWE told Mongabay. “Trees and plants absorb CO2 as they grow. That CO2 is released through combustion. Over a longer period, the maximum amount of wood harvested from forests is equal to the amount planted. The system is balanced and therefore sustainable.”
Forest advocates in Europe, Asia, the U.S. and Canada have long pushed back against such claims with ample scientific evidence. They argue that the billions in government subsidies are misplaced, that burning wood generates more carbon emissions per unit of energy than coal and that even in the unlikely event enough trees are replanted and allowed to grow to maturity, it takes as much as a century for those trees to recapture the carbon released immediately upon burning.
In an intensifying climate crisis, such a time frame is not practical or sustainable, forest advocates say.
But still, the subsidy-driven pellet industry boomed. At one United Nations climate summit after another, national governments with laws on the books requiring the phaseout of coal by 2030 aligned with forest biomass producers and energy providers. Today, the burning of wood constitutes 60% of renewable energy across the EU’s 27 member states, according to the European Commission. The Netherlands ranks among the EU’s highest users by volume of wood pellets consumed for energy and heat.
At the 2021 U.N. climate summit in Scotland, then Dutch policymaker and European Commission Executive Vice President Frans Timmermans told Mongabay that Europe could not meet its energy demands with renewables such as wind and solar and also phase out coal at the same time. Thus, he said, burning wood pellets for energy was a necessity.
To ensure wood pellet production was sustainable and didn’t contribute to destroying global forests, the EU and each member state devised certification schemes that both producers and energy companies are required by law to follow, often necessitating independent third-party certifiers.
But in-depth research by forest advocacy groups — studies by the National Resources Defense Council and the Dogwood Alliance in 2017, and by South Korea-based SFOC in 2025 — found that certification is usually based on computer modeling and rarely on in-person forest or factory observations. In fact, independent certifiers are rarely involved, the studies note, with importing companies self-certifying and thereby qualifying for significant state subsidies.
“The difficulty with certification schemes is that they are massively weighted toward wanting to certify this stuff [forest biomass] as sustainable because it’s convenient to do so,” Matt Williams, a U.K.-based forest advocate with NRDC, told Mongabay. “It’s convenient for industry and it’s convenient for governments. But very rarely is any actual [sustainability] certification happening in actual forests.”
Forest advocates investigate
Almuth Ernsting with Biofueltwatch has been tracking wood pellet imports to the U.K. and EU for years. Using publicly available data and energy-company reporting, Ernsting established that the Netherlands imported nearly 200,000 tons of wood pellets from Malaysia in 2024 alone, with nearly all of it going to RWE.
RWE declined to discuss import amounts with Mongabay. As the energy company stated, all its imports from Malaysia and elsewhere are classified as category 5 under a certification listing known as Green Gold Label (GGL), an assurance that all such classified pellets are pressed from sawmill waste — nothing comes from whole trees.
But Ernsting is skeptical of RWE’s claims not only because of the large amount of sawmill waste it would take to produce 200,000 tons of pellets from Malaysia year after year but also because GGL has not been approved by the European Commission.
In fact, she noted, GGL was created in 2002 by wood pellet importers, not government policymakers. Still, it is an accepted certification practice in the Netherlands, with category 5 pellets not requiring the same level of scrutiny as compared with more stringent certification rules involving round wood and whole trees.
Strikingly, Ernsting said, “GGL relies entirely on self-certificates, without anyone ever visiting a pellet plant.”
Swart, with Comite Schone Lucht, added, “Category 5 biomass has effectively become a legal loophole for circumventing sustainability criteria.”
The complaint moves forward
Last summer, Biofuelwatch and Comite Schone Lucht filed a complaint with the Dutch Emissions Authority and asked that RWE be required to follow EU and Dutch-written biomass certification schemes. The agency agreed to investigate but passed the enforcement request to the country’s climate minister, Sophie Hermans.
Both ruled against the complainants, finding that RWE met Dutch certification requirements and that no enforcement of more rigorous certification schemes was warranted.
In response, RWE told Mongabay that the Dutch Emissions Authority “investigation into the sustainability of wood pellets from Malaysia shows that RWE has fully complied with the applicable rules regarding the use of biomass and that the biomass complied with sustainability criteria. Therefore, the Dutch climate minister has stated there is no need for enforcement. RWE was confident that this would be the outcome and has always stressed the importance of regulations related to sustainability.”
However, Climate Minister Hermans, in her November 2025 report to the Dutch government, raised a red flag concerning the certification process as followed by RWE.
“There is an inherent shortcoming in the certification system due to its voluntary nature,” Hermans wrote, adding that, “The self-declarations on which GGL relies offer little guidance for assessing whether residue and waste flows actually exist.” She noted that the Dutch Emission Authority indicated that a “future alignment with Dutch regulations will address this problem.”
Ernsting and Swart chose not to wait. In January 2026, they appealed the Dutch Emissions Authority and climate minister decisions regarding RWE to the District Court of the Hague. And Swart, encouraged by the national environmental police agency, filed a criminal complaint against RWE with Dutch law enforcement authorities.
The allegations turn on not just wood pellet certification processes, but also on international human rights laws related to deforestation, potentially forged documents and fraud related to RWE receiving lucrative state subsidies. Swart estimated the subsidy amount at 2.4 billion euros ($2.8 billion) through 2027. RWE declined to disclose the amount of its subsidies.
The outcome of a possible criminal investigation, which could take a year or more, if or when an investigation starts, could portend dramatic changes in how wood pellets are produced, subsidized and certified in the Netherlands and across the European Union.
Regardless, said Williams with NRDC, “Even if you were to design a perfect sustainability certification scheme that meant there was no harm to ecosystems and biodiversity, you would never be able to burn forest biomass in a way that produces a meaningful climate benefit over a meaningful or useful time frame.”
Banner image: Wood pellets for biomass energy. Image courtesy of Dogwood Alliance.
Justin Catanoso is a regular contributor to Mongabay and a professor of journalism at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
Citations:
Schlesinger, W. H. (2018). Are wood pellets a green fuel? Science, 359(6382), 1328-1329. doi:10.1126/science.aat2305
Sterman, J. D., Siegel, L., & Rooney-Varga, J. N. (2018). Does replacing coal with wood lower CO <sub>2</sub> emissions? Dynamic lifecycle analysis of wood bioenergy. Environmental Research Letters, 13(1), 015007. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aaa512
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