BRUSSELS — The European Commission has unveiled a new plan to end the dominance of planet-heating fossil fuels in Europe’s economy — and replace them with trees.

The so-called Bioeconomy Strategy, released Thursday, aims to replace fossil fuels in products like plastics, building materials, chemicals and fibers with organic materials that regrow, such as trees and crops.

“The bioeconomy holds enormous opportunities for our society, economy and industry, for our farmers and foresters and small businesses and for our ecosystem,” EU environment chief Jessika Roswall said on Thursday, in front of a staged backdrop of bio-based products, including a bathtub made of wood composite and clothing from the H&M “Conscious” range.

At the center of the strategy is carbon, the fundamental building block of a wide range of manufactured products, not just energy. Almost all plastic, for example, is made from carbon, and currently most of that carbon comes from oil and natural gas.

But fossil fuels have two major drawbacks: they pollute the atmosphere with planet-warming CO2, and they are mostly imported from outside the EU, compromising the bloc’s strategic autonomy.

The bioeconomy strategy aims to address both drawbacks by using locally produced or recycled carbon-rich biomass rather than imported fossil fuels. It proposes doing this by setting targets in relevant legislation, such as the EU’s packaging waste laws, helping bioeconomy startups access finance, harmonizing the regulatory regime and encouraging new biomass supply.

The 23-page strategy is light on legislative or funding promises, mostly piggybacking on existing laws and funds. Still, it was hailed by industries that stand to gain from a bigger market for biological materials.

“The forest industry welcomes the Commission’s growth-oriented approach for bioeconomy,” said Viveka Beckeman, director general of the Swedish Forest Industries Federation, stressing the need to “boost the use of biomass as a strategic resource that benefits not only green transition and our joint climate goals but the overall economic security.”

How renewable is it?

But environmentalists worry Brussels may be getting too chainsaw-happy.

Trees don’t grow back at the drop of a hat and pressure on natural ecosystems is already unsustainably high. Scientific reports show that the amount of carbon stored in the EU’s forests and soils is decreasing, the bloc’s natural habitats are in poor condition and biodiversity is being lost at unprecedented rates.

Protecting the bloc’s forests has also fallen out of fashion among EU lawmakers. The EU’s landmark anti-deforestation law is currently facing a second, year-long delay after a vote in the European Parliament this week. In October, the Parliament also voted to scrap a law to monitor the health of Europe’s forests to reduce paperwork.

Environmentalists warn the bloc may simply not have enough biomass to meet the increasing demand.

“Instead of setting a strategy that confronts Europe’s excessive demand for resources, the Commission clings to the illusion that we can simply replace our current consumption with bio-based inputs, overlooking the serious and immediate harm this will inflict on people and nature,” said Eva Bille, the European Environmental Bureau’s (EEB) circular economy head, in a statement.

Too wood to be true

Environmental groups want the Commission to prioritize the use of its biological resources in long-lasting products — like construction — rather than lower-value or short-lived uses, like single-use packaging or fuel.

A first leak of the proposal, obtained by POLITICO, gave environmental groups hope. It celebrated new opportunities for sustainable bio-based materials while also warning that the “sources of primary biomass must be sustainable and the pressure on ecosystems must be considerably reduced” — to ensure those opportunities are taken up in the longer term.

It also said the Commission would work on “disincentivising inefficient biomass combustion” and substituting it with other types of renewable energy.

That rankled industry lobbies. Craig Winneker, communications director of ethanol lobby ePURE, complained that the document’s language “continues an unfortunate tradition in some quarters of the Commission of completely ignoring how sustainable biofuels are produced in Europe,” arguing that the energy is “actually a co-product along with food, feed, and biogenic CO2.”

Now, those lines pledging to reduce environmental pressures and to disincentivize inefficient biomass combustion are gone.

“Bioenergy continues to play a role in energy security, particularly where it uses residues, does not increase water and air pollution, and complements other renewables,” the final text reads.

“This is a crucial omission, given that the EU’s unsustainable production and consumption are already massively overshooting ecological boundaries and putting people, nature and businesses at risk,” said the EEB.

Delara Burkhardt, a member of the European Parliament with the center-left Socialists and Democrats, said it was “good that the strategy recognizes the need to source biomass sustainably,” but added the proposal did not address sufficiency.

“Simply replacing fossil materials with bio-based ones at today’s levels of consumption risks increasing pressure on ecosystems. That shifts problems rather than solving them. We need to reduce overall resource use, not just switch inputs,” she said.

Roswall declined to comment on the previous draft at Thursday’s press conference.

“I think that we need to increase the resources that we have, and that is what this strategy is trying to do,” she said.