Summary/Abstract
Next to steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere is essential to keep average global temperature increases to 1.5°C, and well below 2°C. At this point in time, there is effectively only one realistic and sustainable way to help remove large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere: restoring degraded forests. A strong and reliable governance framework is a pre-condition to restore degraded forests at the necessary scale, but the EU has no serious plans to develop such a framework. The Commission’s recent proposal for the Regulation on the Governance the Energy Union and the LULUCF Regulation are timid first steps in the right direction. But even if adopted, the EU’s governance framework would remain insufficient to help remove the required amounts of CO2 through restoring degraded forests. To this end, this report argues that relevant EU laws and policies should contain ambitious forest restoration targets for Member States and the EU as a whole, as well as a robust compliance system. Legally binding targets would improve considerably existing EU forest policies which are based of non-binding instruments with little effect on conserving and enhancing Europe’s forest sinks.