The BioCAT proposal aims at the development of new generation of biomass based room heating appliances. The EU climate and energy strategy for 2020 obviously relies on a significant increase of biomass share in household energy production. In addition new building standards lead to a decrease in heat consumption of households and consequently to a decrease of the nominal power of heating appliances. Therefore small-scale wood fired room heating appliances are a perfectly suited, absolutely climate friendly and cost effective solution. However it is also known that small-scale wood combustion appliances, in particular logwood fired systems – contribute significant shares of gaseous and particulate emissions all over Europe. The only way to solve this resulting conflict of aims is to reduce emissions from logwood fired small-scale combustion systems significantly and this is exactly the mission of the BioCAT – project. The integration of a new oxidation catalyst system in existing or newly developed biomass combustion appliances will make the developed products defining a new standard in their class concerning gaseous and particulate emissions.The emission targets for the developed manually stoked appliances are in the same range or even better than today’s state-of-the-art automatically fired room heating appliances (pellet stoves). Therefore the expected impacts of the BioCAT project are self-evident: SME partners in the consortium, catalyst system- as well as biomass combustion system manufacturers, will benefit from the technologically outstanding position of their developed products. Positive “side effect” of the expected economic impact is the environmental impact. By reaching a strong market penetration of catalyst equipped combustion systems in the upcoming decade a huge step towards the solution of the air pollution issue of small-scale biomass can be done.