The wide range of revisions to current laws on emission trading, renewable energies, energy efficiency, energy taxation and a set of other pieces of binding and non-binding legislation aim to deliver on the targets agreed in the European Climate Law. With the package, the Commission plans to fundamentally transform the EU’s economy and society for a fair, green and prosperous future. Please find the Commission’s press release including links to all proposals here.
From a forest sector perspective, two proposals are of high importance.
First, the proposal for a revision of the Renewable Energy Directive which sets an increased target to produce 40% of our energy from renewable sources by 2030 and strengthened sustainability criteria for bioenergy. These later create very high concerns from European Forest Owners who had called for implementation of criteria set by RED II before changing these rules.
Secondly, the Commission proposed to revise the Regulation on Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry to set an overall EU target for carbon removals by natural sinks, equivalent to 310 million tons of CO2 emissions by 2030. Next to this, it also now requires the EU to achieve climate neutrality in land use, forestry and agriculture by 2035. Unfortunately, these developments do not correspond to Forest Owners call to keep the forest sector as a separate one under LULUCF and to create a balance between the three climate mitigation benefits provided by forests: sink, storage and substitution.
European Forest Owners will now analyse these two proposals into details to understand their consequences on the forest sector and will continue to bring their expertise and inputs on these two very important files during the co-legislation work.
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