Before further investment is made in developing strategies and projects to combat "bush encroachment" in Namibia and even to use woody plants for energy, it would be imperative to have a solid quantification of the spread of woody plants. This must be based on current data and methods, not on questionable or outdated sources. There are overriding doubts about the use of woody biomass for energy as a contribution to climate change mitigation. This is related to the emission factors of various fuels, where wood has unfavourable values, and generally overestimated substitution effects. In the study presented here, based on international literature, it becomes clear, among other things, that the massive harvesting of woody biomass can lead to ecosystem changes that may even have an unfavourable influence on future vegetation development under climate change. In any case, it is not valid to infer possible future carbon sequestration from past plant growth data, as environmental conditions have changed significantly and further dramatic changes are imminent. Therefore, also with regard to land use, it is recommended that the potential positive effects of greening vegetation be investigated more closely in the future. These include, first and foremost, potentially favourable changes in the landscape water balance and, above all, micro- and mesoclimatic cooling, which is increasingly needed in the face of advancing climate change. The idea of importing bush wood from Namibia is strongly discouraged.