During their debate on Monday 18 December on the proposal for a directive on the monitoring and resilience of forests, the EU environment ministers stressed the need to agree on a rapid and effective methodology for collecting data, without duplicating existing data on the state of forests, whether from Member State inventories or other data, such as that provided by the UN, for example.
The outgoing Spanish Presidency was keen to have this debate on this recent proposal (see EUROPE 13298/15), but it will be up to the Belgian Presidency to determine which Council formation will be responsible for this dossier, acknowledged the Spanish Minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera.
The ministers all agreed that the proposal was timely in terms of improving the capacity to assess and monitor the state of forests, and confirmed the vital environmental role played by forests.
They also stressed the need to take account of the different monitoring systems that exist in many countries in order to be effective and have data that is as comparable as possible.
Some countries, however, would like this issue to be dealt with by the Agriculture Council.
“What I can tell you is that while forest management depends on the primary sector and is linked to agricultural management in terms of harvesting forest products, in other areas it is closer to environmental management”, said Ms Ribera. Luxembourg, which has just created a subsidy for the provision of ecosystem services in forests, is taking this approach.
Belgian minister Alain Maron indicated that forest monitoring and resilience would be a priority for the Belgian Presidency of the Council (mentioned under agriculture in the work programme, page 41). He assured that “these concerns will be duly taken into account, with the help of the expertise available within the Council’s preparatory bodies”.
See the programme: https://aeur.eu/f/a2e (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)