European Parliament aborts mission on new Forest Monitoring Law

Brussels, 21 October 2025 – Today the European Parliament voted against a proposal for a Forest Monitoring Law that would have required EU Member States to monitor forests more regularly and report on them transparently. 

Kelsey Perlman, European Forest campaigner at Fern, said: "The Parliament has thrown away a huge opportunity to better address the challenges our forests face. How can we make our forests more resilient if we can’t see quickly and clearly the impacts of forestry and how it relates to the rising stressors of climate change?” 

The plenary vote comes after years of European Parliament and Council discussions that could have guaranteed transparent, robust and continuous forest monitoring across Europe.  

First proposed in 2023, the law aimed to harmonise forest data collection and provide open access to detailed, accurate and timely information on the status and trends of their forests.  

The proposal enjoyed support from companies, academics, NGOs, and foresters. 

However, successive votes brought the proposed law before political forces who either refused to see Europe’s forests clearly or wanted to jump on the political bandwagon of dismantling green safeguards at the EU level. And with every step, the EU lost the opportunity to bring Europe’s vital forests out of the shadows. 

A right- to far-right majority in the European Parliament has proven the most corrosive. For months, they worked hard to hollow out the law, failing that scrapping it entirely. Their proposed amendments sought to remove environmental indicators from the law and to only use satellite monitoring capacities to look at fires. By September 2025, the EPP abandoned efforts for a compromise text with a progressive coalition in the Environment Committee and followed through with its threat to team up with the far right to scrap the law. In the agriculture and environment committees as well as today, this right- to far-right majority have shot down the law, supposedly to keep Brussels out of Member States’ backyards. 

At the same time, Member States were less agreeable, adopting a position for the law that erased its central pillar – satellite monitoring.  

The timing could hardly be worse. Earlier this month, the European Environment Agency (EEA) released its Europe Environment 2025 report, which sounded the alarm on declining forest biodiversity across the continent and cited forestry activities as a major driver.  

“It’s taken years for the EU to even consider sensible forest monitoring rules – years during which a third of its forests have declined in health. When showing where trees are being harvested becomes too politically threatening, we’ve moved from policymaking based on hard evidence to those based on wilful ignorance. It appears the EU doesn’t want to face the awkward facts that forest monitoring would inevitably reveal,” concluded Perlman. 

Hannah Mowat, Campaigns Coordinator at Fern added: “The future of Europe's forests hangs in the balance – the EU Deforestation Regulation and the Nature Restoration Law are under threat, and now the Forest Monitoring Law has been rejected. Meanwhile, people making decisions about forests face a lack of information, foresters lack finance, and small and medium enterprises face unfair competition. We urgently call for an EU dialogue on forests to find a common way forward.” 

Image: European Parliament Audiovisual Service

Categories: European forests, Forest conservation