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In 2025 Fern celebrated its 30th anniversary. At a time when the EU’s progressive forest policies are under concerted attack, the anniversary gave us the chance to take the long view. This year’s Annual Report shows how Fern is responding to the current challenges by meeting people where they’re at: detailing how forests connect to peoples’ lives in surprising ways, from energy bills to cholesterol levels, and transport, and how our campaigns are working to tackle these issues, including by listening to people beyond our bubbles.
04/06/2026
The year was defined by the rousing defence of essential policies protecting forests and peoples’ rights. Concerted attempts to sabotage the Nature Restoration Law (NRL) and the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), the first law of its kind in the world, which had already been passed with a large democratic mandate, were thwarted by a constructive and inclusive global campaign. This Annual Report charts our response to these challenges.
26/06/2025
Every forest-related file working its way through EU lawmaking bodies last year was assailed by vested industry interests and Member States intent on weakening it. But, as our 2023 Annual report details, we - together with our partners - pushed back and showed that protecting forests and the rights of those who live in them is vital to all of our futures.
17/07/2024
Despite the planet’s cascading crises being more visible than ever in 2022 with droughts, floods and forest fires ravaging huge swathes of the planet, and Russia's terrible invasion of Ukraine, followed by an energy crisis that...
30/06/2023
Fern campaigning is often behind the scenes and working towards long-term achievements. But 2021 was different, we reaped the results of seeds sown a decade ago or more.
Centre stage was a landmark proposal put forward by the...
22/06/2022
2020 marked Fern’s 25th anniversary. It was also the year that COVID overshadowed all else, triggering the biggest global upheaval since the Second World War. The pandemic - and the well-documented links between the relentless...
19/07/2021
The world’s forests, and the rights of many who depend on them, remained under assault in 2019.
These attacks came from many directions: from the erosion of environmental and human rights protections in Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro, to the Amazon fires; from the EU’s devastating bioenergy policy, to its raft of Free Trade Agreements with forested countries to increase our insatiable consumption of products that drive deforestation; from a lack of secure tenure rights for people depending on forests for their survival, to failures of transparency and accountability in the forest sector…
23/06/2020
The reality of climate breakdown dawned for many in 2018. The Northern Hemisphere baked. The polar caps melted. Forest fires raged. In the midst of those events, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that we have just 12 years left to avert disaster. This same report highlighted that unless we harness forests’ awesome natural power, runaway climate change is inevitable.
Throughout 2018, Fern presented a positive vision for how to do so.
08/07/2019
2017 was a year in which extreme weather events pushed climate to the top of many people's agenda. It was also the year in which Fern launched its new restoration campaign and said goodbye to our founder Saskia Ozinga. Read our Annual Report to find out more about what it is like to work for Fern and how we are getting the EU to work for people and forests.
19/06/2018
It’s been a year of political earthquakes. The UK voted to leave the European Union. The US President says that climate change is a Chinese hoax and is rolling back years of hard-won environmental laws. And we’ve supposedly entered the post-truth age, where ‘alternative facts’ streamed via social media are the main news source for millions...
19/06/2017
