S4F Local | Dogwood Alliance

S4F Local Movements

In North Carolina and Georgia, we are doubling down on forest protection, and we need your help.

Dogwood Alliance actively leads Stand4Forests campaigns to protect forests across the Southern US.

That means we are:

ensuring protection for 35 million acres of wetland forests
fighting alongside a community to stop a wood pellet plant
sending thousands of messages to EU policymakers that proclaim, “Our forests aren’t fuel!”
ensuring that our EPA doesn’t promote the burning of forests for fuel

Right now, our biggest local campaigns are in North Carolina and Georgia.

Stand4Forests North Carolina

North Carolina forests and communities face terrible threats from the biomass industry. Our NC forests are being clearcut, turned into wood pellets, and shipped to Europe to be burned for electricity. This is not renewable energy.

The world’s largest producer of wood pellets, Enviva, owns and operates three wood pellet facilities in North Carolina.

Enviva also operates a facility in Virginia near our border. By conservative estimates, meeting the production capacity of these four facilities requires logging nearly 50,000 acres of forest per year—often in ecologically important, native hardwood forests.

Wood pellets, also known as biomass, are shipped overseas to be burned in European power stations.

The scale, location, and pace of this logging have hurt our environment, our climate, and our communities.

Every single one of Enviva’s NC plants is located in an environmental justice community – communities below the state median income and where at least 25% of the population are people of color. These communities are already burdened with other polluting industries, and Enviva’s facilities threaten local residents with harmful toxins and a degraded quality of life.

Governor Cooper has pledged to uphold the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Forest conservation and restoration are critical to meeting those goals. Forests are the most powerful way to pull carbon from the atmosphere. Regrowth of forests in other areas removes about one-third of the carbon emitted to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. But, forests are burned for electricity, it immediately emits large amounts of carbon to the atmosphere. The more biomass that’s burned, the larger those emissions.

Now is the time for us to protect forests, not clearcut them to be burned for electricity.

Forests need to be at the forefront of the agenda on:

climate action
community resilience
flood mitigation
water quality
alternative rural economic development

We can’t solve the climate crisis without a major scale-up in forest protection and restoration across the planet.

Take action and tell Governor Cooper to Stand4Forests!

We’re calling on Governor Cooper to stand by his vision of clean air and a healthy environment as the path to a strong economy and healthy future. We call on him to stand for the environment, stand for justice, and stand for forests.

Want to keep up with the local NC Stand4Forests movement? Follow the Stand4Forests North Carolina Facebook page.

Stand4Forests Georgia

Georgia is at a crossroads: we can either continue down the old path of industry that pollutes our environment, makes climate change worse, and leaves our rural communities behind, or we can look forward to new and innovative solutions.

The entire Southeast is at risk from the woody biomass industry that burns forests for fuel, and Georgia forests are already being cleared at an alarming rate to feed industry demand.

Georgia Biomass, outside of Waycross, Georgia, is home to one of the largest wood pellet plants in the world. The industry claims it only uses waste wood from timber harvests, but it has a proven record of logging whole trees in precious forests.

Burning wood pellets for fuel increases carbon emissions and pollutes communities while reducing their resilience to the ever-stronger storms we’re seeing from climate change. We simply can’t afford this type of unchecked, destructive growth at a time when we need to be investing in solutions that put our state on the path to climate resiliency.

Now is the time for us to protect forests, not clearcut them to be burned for electricity.

Thankfully, some counties and cities in Georgia are already taking action to stand up against the forest destruction of the biomass industry. Energy from burning wood pellets is not economically competitive with true renewables like solar and wind.

Resolutions calling for an end to incentives and subsidies to the biomass industry are important tools to stop the growth of the industry. These keep more forests standing. A growing number of these resolutions are being passed across the state. Other municipalities are passing 100% clean energy resolutions calling for all energy used to be produced by true clean, renewable energy sources by a certain date. These are all a good start, and Dogwood Alliance has resources to help you get started in your town.

Pledge to Stand4Forests

Teams dotted across Georgia, in Atlanta, Statesboro, Savannah, Athens, Valdosta, and sprouting up elsewhere are educating their communitities through tabling, presentations, and meetings with their elected officials. Are you ready to be part of the solution?