On Monday 9 December, Europe’s Agriculture Ministers gave their backing to the objective of achieving greater harmonisation of data on the state of Europe’s forests, but the proposal for a monitoring framework was judged to be too complex.
The collection of high-quality, comparable data on forests is helping to increase the resilience of EU forests, according to the Agriculture Ministers. However, they expressed concern that their existing national forest monitoring and reporting systems would have to undergo significant changes, resulting in additional costs and administrative burden to adapt to the new set of forest requirements under the proposal. Ministers questioned the level of detail and quantity of data to be collected, monitored and reported, as well as the frequency of data collection and reporting required by the proposal.
Italy advocated a minimum number of indicators with a common monitoring system, without increasing the administrative burden.
France, Finland and Ireland felt that national competences in forest inventory should be respected. “We must take note of the lack of progress in the negotiations”, according to Paris. National inventories must be taken into account, said Germany, which is in favour of respecting subsidiarity.
Sweden questioned the “added value” of the proposal and agreed with France, Finland and Slovenia that a regulation was “not necessary”. The Hungarian Presidency of the EU Council presented a progress report.
See the report: https://aeur.eu/f/en3 (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)