Last week, the Commission launched a public consultation on the new EU Framework for Forest Monitoring and Strategic Plans, a proposal for a regulation centered on the development of a forest monitoring framework capable of providing comprehensive and continuous information on the state of forests located in member countries of the European Union.
Forests play a crucial role in favor of terrestrial biodiversity, sheltering over 80% of all the existing species of animals, plants and insects living in the planet. In recent years, the loss of hectares and species in this sort of ecosystems has skyrocketed due to several reasons involving climate change, such as the suffocating heat waves we’ve been going through this year.
However, during this summer the situation has dramatically evolved to become an even bigger problem, irreparably harming a large number of forest ecosystems that represent the livelihood of over 1,500 million people in the world. In Spain, fires have caused the extinction of almost 300,000 hectares, and that’s only as of this year. An amount that is four times larger than the annual average recorded over the last 15 years.
Thus, it is expected that this initiative will serve as a supporting tool in the decision-making towards a sustainability-driven forest management and the adaptation of forestry to the effects of climate change, in addition to being an important source of data for the development of new policies that regulate the various products and services originated in these areas of nature.
As one of the flagship initiatives of the European Green Deal, the EU’s new EU forest strategy for 2030 is committed to protecting biodiversity on the continent, aiming at diminishing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by that date, together with the objective of achieving climate neutrality by 2050.
In this sense, our initiative is part of the ecosystem of LIFE projects that promote the ecological and sustainable values proposed by the European Commission. Although from a different core standpoint, energy, we are committed to promoting circular economy and the transition towards a greater leading role for renewable energies, favoring the conservation of ecosystems and the species inhabiting them.
