Indonesian floods and deforestation
The floods and landslides that hit Indonesia in late November did not come out of a clear blue sky, but result from an ecological crisis decades in the making. They destroyed over 100,000 homes and countless other buildings and infrastructure, and displaced some 1.2 million people. As of Monday, 15 December, they had claimed the lives of 1,030 people, with 206 people still missing, Reuters reports.
They could also spell the death knell for the world’s rarest primate, the Tapanuli orangutan. Less than 800 of these critically endangered great apes remained in the wild, according to The Guardian, but up to 54 are thought to have perished in the floods in what has been described as an “extinction-level disturbance for the species”.
Countless other animals both wild and domestic were washed away. The government was quick to blame “an extremely rare” weather phenomenon until images of piled up trunks and timber went viral on social media, after which it quickly pledged to investigate logging permits, review forest governance and prosecute any would-be violators.
Humans did most definitely have a hand in this tragedy.
The monsoon rains and Cyclonic Storm Senyar massing over the Malacca Straight dumped over 1,000 mm of rain in just four days. World Weather Attribution has calculated that this extreme rainfall “corresponds to roughly a 1-in-70-year event in today’s climate” and that rainfall in the area had increased in intensity by 9-50% due to anthropogenic climate change.
Deforestation, poor forest management, illegal logging and mining, pulp-wood farms and the rapid expansion of palm oil plantations helped exacerbate matters.
The Island of Sumatra has lost some 4.4 million hectares (ha) of forest since 2001. In the flood-affected areas of Aceh, North Sumatra and West Sumatra, around 1.4 million ha of forest were razed between 2016-25. It’s no surprise to learn that the hardest hit areas were degraded watersheds according to the Indonesia Environmental Forum (Walhi), which goes on to warn that, from 1990 – 2014, around 158,000 ha of forest were cleared for palm oil plantations.
Indonesia is the world’s largest palm oil exporter and Sumatra produces more palm oil than any other Indonesian island. Expanding plantations have, in the last 20 years, been responsible for the loss of 1/3 of the country’s old-growth forest.
China, India and Europe are the largest importers of palm oil for use as biodiesel, and in food products and the oleochemical industry. Domestic consumption is also growing.
Floods, storms and torrential rain fuelled by global heating are increasing in intensity in Europe. In 2024 they affected 413,000 people and almost a third of the continent’s river network. These floods aren’t just “natural” disasters but an ecological crisis years in the making.
Firstly, deforestation contributes to global warming, among other things. Secondly, deforestation leaves humans and animals even more vulnerable to extreme weather events (torrential rain, flooding, landslides, drought, aridity, heat, etc.). And still we go on cutting down forests.
Indonesia alone plans to open up 20 million ha of forest for food and energy.
Dezember 2025
Photo: Walhi
Why biofuels are not the solution
New study shows biofuels emit more CO2 globally than the fossil fuels they replace, with 1/5 of all vegetable oil consumed by cars, not people.
Biofuels—plant-based substitutes for petrol, diesel, heavy fuel oil and even kerosene—were a hot topic at COP30. They are being touted as the solution for decarbonising the transport sector, very much as woody biomass claims to be decarbonising the energy industry.
The goal, vigorously promoted by Brazil, India, Italy and Japan, is to quadruple the use of biofuels by 2035 in order for them to supply 10% of road transportation, 15% of aviation and 35% of shipping fuel needs.
23 countries had signed up by the end of the Conference.
So why is this such a bad idea?
Not only do biofuels require land, water, subsidies and energy to grow, but producing and using them emits 16% more CO2 than the fossil fuels they seek to replace, according to the study.
Hardly a panacea for helping to mitigate the climate crisis…
… or for stemming biodiversity loss…
… or indeed for feeding the world.
One fifth of all vegetable oil which could be consumed by humans is burned in cars instead. In 2023, this amounted to 120 million tonnes of sugarcane/sugar-beet and 150 million tonnes of corn.
Crops used for biofuel account for just 4% of global transport energy demands but take up 32 million hectares, an area the size of Italy which could, if planted with food crops instead, help feed 1.3 billion people.
Growing biofuels also requires copious amounts of freshwater, fertilisers and pesticides, and pollutes air and water, and erodes soils. Just like any other commodity, biofuels are subject to supply and demand and, as demand increases, so supply is squeezed and food prices soar.
Yet based on current projections the arable land used to grow biofuels could increase to 52 million ha (an area the size of France) by 2030, with the resulting biofuels emitting 70 million tons of CO2, equal to the yearly emissions from some 30 million diesel cars, the study found.
So where will all this extra land come from? Either from converting forests and grasslands to cropland or by farming existing arable land more intensively, thereby emitting even more CO2 and hastening ecosystem and biodiversity loss.
And the cherry on the cake? When all growing and processing stages are factored in, biofuels use more energy to produce than they actually deliver.
So, what is the solution?
The study found that covering just 3% of the land devoted to growing biofuels with solar farms would produce the same amount of energy.
We must ensure the end of the road for biofuels and greatly reduce all burning in general.
December 2025
Biofuels are more harmful than fossil fuels
There is a global trend, also in Switzerland, to replace harmful substances with others that are even worse. For example, fossil fuels are being replaced by wood combustion or biofuels.
Read our new article to find out why this is a step in the wrong direction and why biofuels are not the solution.
Burgergemeinde Bern: Greenwashing and misinformation about clear-cutting and so-called sick trees?
The timber lobby is increasingly reporting on supposedly diseased or old trees that need to be cut down. The City of Bern is also justifying clear-cutting in the Wylerwald forest on its Facebook social media channel – in a report full of misinformation and falsehoods. According to the City of Bern, beech trees are particularly affected by climate change: “the trees are rotting from inside”.
This is a blatant lie, which is immediately exposed by their own photo showing an old beech tree with heart rot as evidence.
Heart rot is a normal aging process. Hollow trees often remain very stable and are hotspots of biodiversity. In other countries, trees are even “inoculated” with fungi to induce precisely this type of rot.
It is therefore astonishing that the Burgergemeinde of Bern describes heart rot as a disease and convinces the population that the beeches must be cut down. In doing so, they are threatening countless organisms.
Photo: Burgergemeinde of Bern on Facebook, November 26, 2025
All secondhand smoke is harmful – but wood smoke is the most toxic
A few years ago, the tobacco industry ran one of the world’s most successful advertising campaigns for smoking.
Today, the wood lobby is using exactly the same tactics to promote wood burning. Just as with cigarette smoke back then, the massive harmfulness of wood smoke is being hushed up today. But the facts have long been clear: pollutants from wood burning, regardless of the wood heating system used, cause cancer 30 times more often than cigarette smoke, among other things. All it takes is one neighbour operating a wood heating system.
Read more about the interesting comparison between wood smoke and cigarette smoke here.
Debunking wood smoke’s squeaky clean image
Remember when you could smoke literally everywhere? Cinemas, restaurants, planes and even hospital waiting rooms were filled with a fug of toxic fumes. Doctors had a predilection for Camels, Pall Malls proved a particularly welcome gift for Christmas and rugged Marlborough Men galloped off into the sunset propelling the brand to the world’s number one spot.
The tobacco industry produced some of the world’s most memorable and successful ad campaigns. And it proved a past master at cozying up to politicians, manufacturing doubt, sowing misleading claims and legitimising products whose health risks it knew about very early on.
Smoking was sexy and non smokers quite literally had to suck up secondhand smoke.
Today we know the risks associated with tobacco, just as we know that passive smoking is bad for all those exposed to it, especially children. Yet we continue to think of kids crowded around campfires roasting marshmallows as desirable if not downright wholesome. Wood-burning stoves and fireplaces are likewise romanticised and inexorably interwoven with end of year festivities, family, warmth, hygge and happiness.
But smoke is smoke. Burning plant material—be it leaves or wood—produces carcinogens, mutagens and teratogens that cause and exacerbate serious health problems, increasing the risk of premature death, according to Doctors and Scientists Against Wood Smoke Pollution.”
Wood smoke just contains more of them. It is 30 times more likely to cause tumours than cigarette smoke and its toxic free radicals remain active 40 times longer.
An outdoor fire pit has been shown to emit the same magnitude of fine particulate pollution as 800 cigarettes.
Burning wood for just one hour releases the same deadly chemicals as smoking 6,000 packs of cigarettes. Use your log burner to heat your home for one week and you could be releasing more noxious emissions than smoking a million cigarettes.
So why isn’t this common knowledge? Because the wood burning industry has burnished its image to a squeaky clean sheen by adopting the same tactics as the tobacco industry (and fossil fuel sector) before it.
False claims are made, doubt sowed and figures fudged. Comparing so called eco-wood burners to open fires and old stoves creates a false sense of security even though the former are much more polluting than a gas boiler and 650 times more polluting than a modern HGV truck.
Persuading consumers to switch to “cleaner” eco-stoves mirrors the tobacco industry’s push for smokers to switch to “less hazardous” low-tar and low-nicotine cigarettes. A sleight of hand that also makes the industry part of the solution, not the problem.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes and behind people’s backs, the industry weakens and whittles away at regulatory controls, negotiating exceptions for its products, running emissions certification schemes and influencing or infiltrating the departments set up to regulate it.
There is no safe level of wood smoke exposure.
November 2025
What to do with the ash from district heating plants? A hushed-up problem!
Burning wood in district heating plants and power stations not only emits vast quantities of pollutants and CO2, which are harmful to health and the climate, but also produces toxic ash. Tonnes of toxic ash. The waste incineration plant in the city of Bern alone adds 36% wood to the incineration process and produces 80,000 tons of ash annually – but what to do with it?
Read more about the hidden problem of ash here .
Wood burning doesn’t just emit toxic smoke, it also produces toxic ash
Ash from wood burning is often overlooked, but is a growing problem.
The problems with ash disposal include:
- Non-acceptance by landfill operators (due to issues of cleanliness, contamination, leaching of heavy metals, dust when uploading/depositing, potentially upsetting landfill stability, and the 30-year liability of Swiss landfills)
- Capacity (landfill availability, distribution and local bottlenecks, longer transport routes, extra costs of shipping from remote areas)
- Additional costs to the industry (landfill fees, retrofitting of systems for ash separation and future regulations for the processing of ash etc. plus, the costs of ash disposal that have almost tripled in some plants in recent years)
- The pollutants/toxins that ash contains.
Indeed, trees don’t just lock up carbon, they also lock up toxins… which are released when the wood is felled and burnt. Wood ash, even ash derived from untreated wood, therefore contains heavy metals and other concentrated pollutants which have been linked to cancer, soil and groundwater contamination as well as bioaccumulation in food chains of heavy metal(oids) which include chromium (VI); cadmium; lead; arsenic and mercury.
Pellets aren’t any cleaner. They can produce up to 8% ash which contains lime, magnesium oxide, potassium oxide, phosphate and sodium oxide, as well as heavy metals, such as copper, zinc, chromium, nickel and lead.
In Switzerland, ash is disposed of according to the Waste Ordinance (ADWO). As it cannot be spread on fields or disposed of in forests, it must be sent to the large waste burning plants as this diagram illustrates. Such waste incineration plants also burn wood directly—for instance Bern city’s behemoth uses 36% wood— and together, they produce 80,000 tonnes of various types of ash annually which must be disposed of safely. Grate/bottom/filter ash and dust therefore end up in domestic D landfills (for combustion residues) and E landfills (organic waste), though the ash must first be mixed with slag from waste incineration plants.
However the 20,000 tonnes of the most toxic fly ash (the fine-textured material deposited in boiler exhaust systems) produced annually is either exported, principally to German landfills, or treated domestically. As of 2020, 12 of the country’s waste burning plants and the company Chiresa AG were extracting 3/4 of the heavy metals contained via “acid washing” from fly ash. However the legal obligation to recover heavy metals from such ash which was supposed to start in 2023, has been postponed until 2026. Which means that the other 1/4 is being stocked without treatment because the authorities claim that the heavy metals it contains pose no threat to the environment or to humans!
It would anyway appear that the main reason for removing heavy metals in the first place is less to do with health and more to do with the circular economy and the recycling of zinc, lead and copper. Other solutions which Switzerland is pursuing is to incorporate the ash into cement and fertilisers, but the plants to do this are currently lacking and the market is deemed to be niche.
So, for now untreated ash is still being stocked in landfills in Switzerland or underground landfills in Germany, but Germany is tightening its disposal rules too.
And about time!
Read more here about pollutants produced when burning woody biomass.
November 2025
Wolves, health, forests: Federal Council disregards scientific evidence – and the people’s will.
When it comes to certain issues, the Swiss government prefers to make decisions that favour lobbyists rather than the well-being of the population and the urgent need to preserve nature.
3 examples:
Wolves: In 2020, the Swiss population voted in favor of maintaining the protection of certain animals (ibex/beavers), including the protection of wolves. Nevertheless, Federal Councillor Albert Rösti single-handedly allowed the preventive shooting of wolves. But now the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is stepping in.
Health: The Swiss government promotes the burning of wood, even though all independent international studies prove this to be a fatal step backwards in the fight against climate change and strongly point to the health risks of wood burning .
Forests: The Swiss government and the Federal Office for the Environment promote the clear-cutting of intact forests under the pretext of climate-friendly forest management, even though no studies prove its effectiveness. On the contrary, all independent international studies prove the opposite.
Switzerland’s wolf cull is sending shockwaves through the international conservation community
At last week’s International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Congress held in Abu Dhabi (9-15 October 2025), members adopted Motion142 calling on Switzerland to uphold science-based wildlife conservation.
Why? Because Switzerland’s hunting laws (recently modified despite the outcome of a 2020 national referendum) now allow native and supposedly “protected” wolves, as well as beaver and ibex, to be more easily killed based largely on spurious, unscientific reasons.
Wolves, those eternal scapegoats, are quite literally being massacred, for 8 months a year.
Cubs whose only crime is to have been born are being culled en masse and 6 packs are being eradicated entirely.
Of the 113 cubs recorded in 2025, 73 have been approved for culling. The government calls this “basic regulation”.
13 adult wolves will also be killed, though past culls have shown more will be shot simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The mistaken killing of wolves is deemed perfectly acceptable collateral damage. In the canton of Valais, up to 50% of the wolves shot were the “wrong” wolves. Three lynxes and a livestock protection dog have also been shot by mistake, but the government insists its game wardens and hunters are “specially trained”.
86 wolves in total are targeted with elimination this time, most of which have never attacked livestock.
And this is just for “proactive regulation” from 1 September 2025 to 31 January 2026.
A further 20 “reactive regulation” (from 1 June to 31 August 2025) kill orders were issued and 8 wolves shot.
Legal killing is now responsible for 70% of total known wolf mortality (since 1996) in Switzerland.
No other European country targets wolves in such numbers irrespective of livestock damage or shoots “protected” wolves whose core territory lies within “protected” national parks and UNESCO World Heritage Sites… for allegedly killing two cows.
Indiscriminate culling isn’t just bad for wolves, it risks making livestock predation worse thereby betraying the very industry this policy purports to serve and triggering a race to the bottom where more and more wolves are shot to counter more and more livestock depredation.
Killing wolves is also bad for Swiss forests which are so heavily and selectively browsed by deer in some regions that they are failing to regenerate and changing their species composition. Wolves create a “landscape of fear” which keeps wild prey on the move, enabling forests to recover.
It would seem however that the Swiss Government won’t let either forests or wolves recover.