Information needs for policy processes

Forest data needs in the EU - overview

Data reporting under EU legislation

The volume of EU legislation that explicitly requests the collection of information on forests has increased over the past years. These legislations are diverse in scope, as briefly explained for key examples in the text below.   

The LULUCF Regulation has strict information requirements for Member States, related to land-use change for all land-use types, thus also for forests. This is in the context of greenhouse gas monitoring and the EU and MS commitments to the Paris Agreement. The Renewable Energy Directive (REDII) has a set of LULUCF-related data needs as well as data needs related to its sustainable harvesting criteria. The information needs are on the level of the economic operator, in absence of national or regional legislation (including monitoring and enforcement) that would guarantee the requirements of the regulation are met.  

The regulation on environmental economic accounts has been amended with new modules in the year 2024, which require data on e.g. forest area, growing stock and safeguarding of long-term production capacity. These data requirements are congruent with requirements in other legislation as well, such as the LULUCF Regulation. 

The Nature Directives on species and habitats protection, are closely linked to the Natura 2000 network of protected areas. A significant proportion of Natura 2000 sites are forest habitats and therefore a lot of specific information is required to follow their management and protection status. The Nature Restoration Regulation sets targets and obligations for Member States to restore ecosystems that are degraded or in poor condition, including also affected forest areas. The regulation also requires specific data in order to monitor and enforce its effective implementation. 

Once adopted, the regulation for a monitoring framework for resilient European forests will form a cornerstone in EU forest data collection. Table 1 shows an overview of the indicators as legally required by different policies. Note that the regulation on forest monitoring is in proposal stage and that the indicators subject to the regulation may still change. Some of the regulation’s data are to be produced by the European Commission services, while the preparation of other data will be the responsibility of the EU Member States.

 Forest information collection through voluntary cooperation  

The information needs can also be linked to international cooperation for the development of statistical information on forests. These processes often have a long history and are the basis of the collection of comparable environmental information at global and European levels, with the aim to improve the basis for policy-making.  

The Global Forest Resources Assessment (GFRA) is coordinated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization since 1948. Data is collected at regular intervals from the UN member countries, initially with 10-year intervals and more recently with 5-yearly intervals. The most important source for these data is the respective countries’ in-situ based national forest inventories, which nowadays is sometimes complemented or integrated with remotely sensed data. An example at European level is the Forest Europe interministerial process, and related conference that is organized with a periodicity of 4 to 5 years. Coinciding with the conference, an overview of the State of Europe’s Forests is published, in which contributing countries, and also the EU, give account of the forest by way of 6 criteria comprising 34 quantitative and 11 qualitative indicators. Currently the data collection processes of Forest Europe and GFRA are closely coordinated.  

Another important process for the collection of information on forests is through the UN-ECE/FAO/ITTO/Eurostat Joint Forest Sector Questionnaire.  Since 2001, this global partnership has been gathering yearly data on forest industry production and trade, including wood harvesting and the wood-based products, relying on the voluntary cooperation of participating countries. The UN-ECE/FAO/IEA/EC Joint Wood Energy Enquiry since 2006 collects data on wood energy consumption and the production and trade of various wood-based energy products. 

Forest products production data are collected in EU Member States directly from the manufacturers and shared through the Eurostat PRODCOM database. Forest products trade data are collected by EU Member States, by customs organisations and statistical offices and assembled in the Eurostat COMEXT database. In turn, these data areas are shared with the United Nations COMTRADE database, which hosts trade data from all countries in the world.   

Forest data are also compiled on a less regular basis, in context of ad-hoc reporting on forest ecosystems as called in context of international processes such as for example the Convention on Biological Diversity and the other so-called Rio Conventions, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or the UN Sustainable Development Goals, to name a few examples.