Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether he has made an assessment of the implications for his policies of the forecast of a 190 year carbon payback time for the switch from burning coal to burning wood in the Climatic Change journal article entitled Harvesting in boreal forests and the biofuel carbon debt.

The Government only supports biomass that complies with strict sustainability criteria. In a sustainably managed forest, there will be stands of trees each of different ages, which will be harvested in gradual sequence, and replaced, as they reach maturity. There is evidence to suggest that the overall age profile of the forest therefore remains constant, and carbon sequestration can be maintained decade after decade.