How could European forests best benefit from the EU Forest Monitoring Law?

For decades, intensive forestry practices have meant that healthy biodiverse forests across the European Union (EU) have been replaced with trees that resemble crops. Intensive forest management not only degrades ecosystems, but also reduces the EU’s ability to reach its climate goals. And it’s not just nature that’s suffering. This extractive forestry industry offers fewer and fewer forestry jobs, undermining sustainable rural development.

Monitoring makes it possible to see what forest governance changes need to be made to improve ecosystem health. It is concerning, therefore, that information about the state of forests, and their trends towards destruction or restoration is often scattered, incomparable, inaccessible, outdated or entirely missing.   

This NGO briefing makes recommendations to ensure that the Forest Monitoring Law will enable the EU to live up to its commitments and base future plans on science, allowing for forest ecosystems restoration, carbon storage and sequestration, species protection and socio-economic prosperity.

• The Forest Monitoring Law should be a one-stop shop for assessing progress on the objectives of the forests stated under the European Green Deal and its implementing legislation.
• Robust data collection must inform coherent strategic planning, and be used to monitor progress on plans developed inclusively with stakeholders. Accessing funds for forest activities should be conditional on appropriate planning and monitoring progress.
• Environmental experts should be at the centre of co-decision, implementation and review processes.

For the EU to deliver on the European Green Deal, it needs accurate, harmonised, timely and accessible information about EU forests and forest governance mechanisms. The Commission has produced a strong proposal for the Forest Monitoring Law. It now needs to be built on, in order to guarantee that the data collected from forests is taken into account when planning how they are managed.

Categorías: NGO Statements, European forests