Information needs for policy processes

Information needs by policy 

Forest Monitoring – mandatory information 

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.

Forest data needs in policy processes 

Besides the legislation with strict information requirements as shown in Table 1, many forest information needs are less strict or sometimes implicitly requested by legislation or in policy processes. Nonetheless, the information can be still essential for the policy implementation, monitoring or enforcement thereof. 

The information needs can be directly linked to strategies, action plans and legislation such as for example in the following list:  

• A new EU Forest Strategy for 2030 - a vision and concrete actions to improve the quantity and quality of EU forests and strengthen their protection, restoration and resilience. 

• The Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 - a comprehensive, ambitious and long-term plan to protect nature and reverse the degradation of ecosystems. 

• The 8th Environmental Action Programme - the EU’s legally agreed common agenda for environment policy until 2030, reiterating the EU’s long-term vision to 2050 of living well and within planetary boundaries. 

• The European Green Deal (2019) – to transform the EU into a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy, ensuring: no net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050; economic growth decoupled from resource use; and in a way that no person and no place are left behind. 

• The Updated Bioeconomy Strategy (2018) – proposing actions to scale-up and deploy locally the bioeconomy, capitalising on and going beyond the previous successful R&I investments, in order to create growth and job opportunities at local level, to reinforce the bio-based sector and contribute to the modernisation of EU industry, to protect the environment and enhance ecosystems’ functions and biodiversity. 

• The Water Framework Directive (2000) - focuses on ensuring good qualitative and quantitative health, i.e. on reducing and removing pollution and on ensuring that there is enough water to support wildlife at the same time as human needs. 

• The EU Regulation on Alien Invasive Species (2014) - a set of measures to be taken across the EU in relation to invasive alien species. The core of the Regulation is the list of Invasive Alien Species of Union concern (Union List).

¹ Services here refer to economic activities: forest tree nursery services, support services to forestry, and any other services provided by a local kind-of-activity unit (KAU) of the forestry industry.