Three decades of protecting forests and rights
5 December 2025
In recent years, forests moved to the heart of EU policymaking, but now a range of forces are pushing back against all that’s been achieved. This is a moment of reckoning and we must hold tight to our founding values, writes Campaigns Coordinator Hannah Mowat, reflecting on Fern’s 30-years of existence.
Thirty years ago, two friends started Fern from a small shed in Oxfordshire. Saskia Ozinga’s and Sian Pettman’s backgrounds complemented each other – and Fern’s mission – perfectly. Saskia was a Friends of the Earth Netherlands campaigner, who had helped stop companies from selling unsustainable tropical timber. Sian had worked at the European Commission, knew its inner workings, and had been instrumental in drafting its tropical forests’ policy.
Understanding European power was therefore in Fern’s DNA from the beginning. More precisely, we were acutely aware of the influence that the European Commission – through its role proposing, developing and amending legislation – had on forests around the world, as well as the lives of the people who depend on them.
Much, inevitably, has changed in the three decades since, including the EU’s political landscape and the threats facing forests, both in Europe and in the tropics. Fern has gone from two people working out of a shed, to having 22 staff and offices in Brussels, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and France. Meanwhile efforts to protect forests have moved from a relatively niche corner of EU policymaking to centre stage – which is now facing a relentless pushback from various vested interests.
‘The Forest Years’
When I began my journey with Fern around a decade ago, the organisation was sowing many of the seeds which would later bear fruit. Fern could point to many significant policy achievements over the years, but policymakers were nevertheless often reluctant to engage with our issues. So we spent a lot of time researching, talking to different stakeholders, building partnerships, and working out what change should look like.
2018 was a watershed. In August that year, 15-year-old Greta Thunberg went on a school strike outside the Swedish Parliament, demanding urgent action to tackle the climate crisis. Her stand blossomed into a global movement. At the same time, the reality of ecological breakdown was becoming ever clearer.
In Europe, scientists were alarmed that forests in several EU countries were turning into a source of greenhouse gas emissions. And in 2019, disturbing images of fires ripping through the Amazon, the world’s largest tract of rainforest, sparked global outrage – particularly as Brazil’s then President Jair Bolsonaro was busy dismantling environmental protections and Indigenous’ rights.
Fern had campaigned for years for the EU to address its outsized role in the destruction of the Amazon and other tropical rainforests through its imports of goods such as soy, beef, palm oil and rubber. Now our message had penetrated the mainstream. In December 2019, shortly after taking office and launching the European Green Deal, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared that: “Protecting our planet and shared environment is our generation’s defining task.”
The Forest Years’ had begun. The number of forest-related initiatives to emerge from the Commission in this period was almost unfathomable: the EU Regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR), the Nature Restoration Law, the Forest Monitoring Law, the Farm to Fork Strategy, and a host of other policies which had the potential to protect forests in Europe or around the world, were instigated with large-scale public backing.
EU policymakers had grasped the link between nature, climate and economic development and recognised that the EU should at the very least ensure that its own consumption is sustainable.
At the same time, old orthodoxies on tropical deforestation’s causes and solutions were crumbling. As the author (and Fern Board member) Fred Pearce compellingly charts, forest dwellers went from being widely seen as driving tropical deforestation, to being recognised as holding the solution to it: Fern had promoted the latter narrative - based on overwhelming evidence – for years, including by campaigning for the EU’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan to institutionalise community rights at heart of anti-deforestation strategies.
A similar revolution was happening within Fern’s European Forest campaign, where we pivoted our strategy to focus on governance, and building stronger links with foresters whose management techniques support biodiversity and the climate. All the while, we doubled down on our campaign against the biggest rising pressure on forests, coming from demand for bioenergy. We helped shift the narrative (with rigorous evidence) to show that what policy makers saw as a purely green energy source, is really a climate and health hazard.
Fern isn't an organisation that seeks the sugar rush of short-term victories. We’re after long-term wins, because we believe improving governance is the primary way of addressing environmental destruction.
Casting a wider net
In last 18 months or so, a so-called ‘greenlash’ against policies to protect nature and the planet has gathered speed. In 2024, this was epitomised by an attempt to sabotage the Nature Restoration Law (NRL) and the EUDR, the first law of its kind in the world, which had already been passed with a large democratic mandate.
Why is this green backlash happening? And how best can we respond?
In part, it’s because these laws mean something, and in many cases the time for implementation, rather than discussion, has arrived. The inevitable resistance of vested interests to policies which require them to change their practices has been intensified by the economic crisis, with higher inflation, tighter government spending and greater global instability. But it is also important to think about how we, and all who advocate for policies to protect people and the planet, could improve.
A clear starting point is to bring people along with us, both in the global South and in Europe. While we obviously speak to our partners, Indigenous representatives and businesses, we should always look to cast the net wider and ask: ‘Who is this policy impacting? How can we bring them on board to ensure big, long-term changes are sustainable?’
The seeds of change
As we enter a period in which climate and environmental policies are under attack and civic space contracting, we mustn't lose sight of the need to continue sowing the seeds for change. Fern isn't an organisation that seeks the sugar rush of short-term victories. We’re after long-term wins, because we fundamentally believe improving governance is the primary way of addressing environmental destruction.
This is a moment of reckoning, as other global powers rise, and power within the EU is shifting. Many of the minerals the EU needs for the digital and green transitions lie in community lands in tropical forested countries. Europe will need to enter truly equal relationships with them if it wants access to their minerals. It must also anchor forest governance into broader geoeconomic interests to ensure that the green transition is also socially and environmentally sustainable.
The seeds we've already planted, and the relationships we’ve nurtured, will pay dividends in the next few years, as we bring the changes we have set in motion to completion. And as we lay the groundwork for future change, we will be guided by the values that have served Fern so well for the past 30 years: building networks, ensuring our work is evidence-based (with a strong focus on research), and being constructive.
We must now find smart ways of being audible in a difficult context, ensuring that the voices of forest peoples are communicated in ways that policymakers hear, calling out policies that are opposed to what we're trying to achieve - and never wilting in the face of injustice.
This piece was first published in Fern's 2024 Annual Report.
Image: Daria Andreeva/Fern
Category: News
