European Agroforestry Federation
EURAF
The European Agroforestry Federation (EURAF) aims at promoting the use of trees on farms as well as any kind of silvopastoralism throughout the different environmental regions of Europe.
ID: 913270437706-82
Lobbying Activity
Response to Verification of carbon removals, carbon farming and carbon storage in products
1 Jul 2025
EURAF represents members and Affiliated Entities on 23 EU Countires who are working to increase the use of agroforestry on agricultural and forest land. We attach detailed comments on the draft CRCF Implementing Regulation. However in view of some of the critical comments made by some commentators on the CRCF process generally we wish to add the following points: 1. EURAF commends DGCLIMA for the efforts it has made in the CRCF to link to existing DGAGRI agricultural records (e.g. the IACS.LPIS system), existing DGENV nature restoration activities (e.g. the list of NRR activities in the Regulation and the possible use of landscape feature information) and the DGFISMA work on the sustainable finance initiative (sustainability taxonomy). At all levels there was a genuine effort for "joined up thinking" 2. EURAF strongly welcomes the option of certification for agroforestry schemes with trees 5 years old or younger. Young trees grow very slowly in most parts of Europe and carbon absorbed in these new plantings will not be significant. Also a link between CAP establishment funding and CRCF longer-term support is seen as vital (see the "carbon farming starter pack" proposal). Agroforestry establishment in the previous CAP (2015-2022) was only 5 kha from an initially planned total of 80 kha. The financial additionality test is clearly passed! 3. EURAF has lobbied that the second carbon farming methodology should be called "afforestation" rather than "tree planting". Afforestation involves a change in land use. Agroforestation does not. The two are very different forms of "tree planting" and should be clearly distinguished. 4. EURAF notes that there are around 15 Mha of existing agroforestry in Europe (and is working to make the identification methodology more reliable - using 100% survey data rather than LUCAS extrapolations). Much of this area is degraded "wood pasture" - so the first carbon farming methodology should be open for tree planting/ regeneration in these areas, as well as in parcels where there are no existing trees. 5. EURAF believes that action to reduce emissions is clearly needed at the same time as carbon farming certification. It also notes that emission reduction of N2O and CH4 can be included in the carbon farming certification process in addition to carbon sequestration. Some responses have been too critical of the DGCLIMA proposals. The need for both emission reduction and carbon sequestration is dire and the LULUCF target of -310 MtCO2 will clearly be missed in 2030. Let's get on with working together to make the CRCF a success. 6. EURAF notes the DGCLIMA consultancies into a possible "Agri-ETS" aka "ETS-3" and we support these initiatives. The need for urgent large scale planting of trees outside the forest, and for increased afforestation is clear.
Read full responseResponse to Towards a Circular, Regenerative and Competitive Bioeconomy
23 Jun 2025
The European Agroforestry Federation (EURAF) aims at promoting the use of trees on farms as well as any kind of silvopastoralism throughout the different environmental regions of Europe. EURAF's Mission is to ensure that there is at least 10% tree crown cover on grassland and cropland in all European regions by 2040 - and this will be achieved by supporting efforts to develop awareness, education, research, policy-making and investments which foster the use of trees on farms. In EURAF's view, the new Bioeconomy Strategy of the EU will play a role in further accelerating the transition towards food system supporting sustainable food and nutrition security for all, where agroforestry systems will play an integral part. The document attached (pdf) is EURAF's contribution to the discussion on the future Bioeconomy Strategy communication. EURAF is keen to continue the dialogue with the European Commission on the subject of bioeconomy, also by engaging in the discussions around the CBE JU Working Group on Primary Producers (in which EURAF and its affiliate, the German Agroforestry Association, are members).
Read full responseMeeting with Taru Haapaniemi (Cabinet of Commissioner Christophe Hansen)
14 May 2025 · Agroforestry
Response to European Water Resilience Strategy
4 Mar 2025
Dear Ms/Mr, EURAF's input to the 'call for evidence' on the guiding principles of the 'Water Resilience Strategy' is attached as pdf.
Read full responseResponse to Uniform format for national restoration plans
5 Feb 2025
Briefing #18 (v4) focuses on the Nature Restoration Regulation draft Implementing Regulation and its Annex (Uniform Format Nature Restoration Plans). To overcome the lack of targets on agroforestry we recommend that Member States code agricultural trees as woody landscape features and that reporting on these areas should be mandatory. We conclude: a) the NRR index for high diversity landscape features remains different from that used in CAP reporting and a single index is needed: b) mandatory indices of forest diversity should not include fields like standing dead or lying dead biomass, which may undermine the very objectives of the regulation by increasing wildfire risk in most parts of Europe; c) ecological classifications and measures need to be cross-mapped against agricultural land uses and practices, and that this should be done on a parcel by parcel basis using the CAP Land Parcel Information System (LPIS), including information on forest land and parcel boundaries. An open-source Rural Land Parcel Information System, based on the existing agricultural LPIS but including forest parcels, is needed in all Member States. It can then be used for CAP, NRR, SFI, LULUCF, CRCF and Corporate Sustainability reporting. For full details see EURAF Policy Briefing #18 v4 https://zenodo.org/records/14810873
Read full responseMeeting with Valérie Hayer (Member of the European Parliament)
27 Jan 2025 · Agroforesterie
Response to Economic accounts for agriculture in the Union
23 Aug 2024
The European Agroforestry Federation (euraf.net) is an NGO established in Paris on 16.11.2016. I has affiliates in 23 EU Member States and promotes the adoption of agroforestry practices across europe - by supporting efforts to develop awareness, education, research, policy making and incestments which foster the use of trees on farms. We note that that the Annex to this Regulation mentions "Inseparable, non-agricultural secondary activities are activities whose costs cannot be observed separately from those of the agricultural activity. Examples are the processing of farm products on the farm, forestry, logging, tourism." and are pleased that information on these revenues will be collected. However: 1) Member States should set an example and provide information on forestry-related expenditure in their National Programmes covered by the ABER Regulation - see EURAF Policy Briefing #19 ( https://zenodo.org/record/7907075). An increasing number of member states (IE, NL, FI, SE, DE (most lander), LU - and recently FR) are funding forestry outside their CAP budgets, although often with other EU funds. These countries do not provide any CAP metrics relating to forestry (e.g. Result Indicator 17). This makes it very difficult to get an EU-level overview of forest-related activity, including agroforestry. It is therefore important that ALL Member States should provide information on farm-forestry economic accounts under the heading of "inseparable, non-agricultural secondary activities". 2) Carbon farming is starting to provide an increasingly important part of farm incomes. It is important that separate codes are provided for voluntary and (eventual) statutory carbon certification.
Read full responseResponse to Report on the evaluation of the LULUCF Regulation
10 Jul 2024
The European Agroforestry Federation is an international NGO with Registered in France (Transparency RegisterID 913270437706-82). We aim to promote the adoption of agroforestry practices across Europe by supporting efforts to develop awareness, education, research, policymaking and investments which foster the use of trees on farms. We have a network of 31 affiliated organisations in 31 Countries. EURAF has prepared an updated version of our Policy Briefing #17 in response to this consultation ... it is available on zenodo.org/record/7907132 The Policy Briefing considers the effectiveness, efficiency, relevance and coherence of the 2023 LULUCF Regulation and conclude that: 1) The EU LULUCF Regulation (2023) is a crucial stepping-stone to effective monitoring of GHG emissions in Member States and to the collective achievement of the challenging target of -310 MtCO2e yr-1 net LULUCF emission by Member States in 2030. However, very few Member States have amended their National Energy and Climate Plans or CAP Strategic Plans to help meet their targets; nor have they recognised that the continuing decline of sequestration in Europe's forests means that an urgent planting programme for Trees outside Forests is needed. 2) EURAF suggests that 11.2 million ha of new agroforestry should be planted by 2040, which would generate around 56 MtCO2e over the life of the plantations. This new agroforestry should be focused in the European regions and counties with fewest trees (see map provided in the full briefing). 3) Combined agricultural and LULUCF emissions have been described by the IPCC since 2008 as "Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use" (AFOLU). The term is used by most of the world and should be used by the Commision, 4) AFOLU reporting by Member States should be integrated with carbon farming reporting methods using the CAP Land Parcel Information System (LPIS), extended to include forest parcels (as in Spain). Integrating all rural land-use data in this way will also facilitate the accurate implementation of the EU Deforestation Regulation in Europe, and could be a precursor to the introduction of an AFOLU-ETS Regulation and expansion of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism for imports of timber and foodstuffs. For details contact policy@euraf.net
Read full responseMeeting with Maroš Šefčovič (Executive Vice-President) and European farmers and
14 Mar 2024 · High level dialogue on forest-based bioeconomy
4 Feb 2024
The European Agroforestry Federation (www.euraf.net) is an NGO, which aims to promote the adoption of agroforestry practices across Europe by developing awareness, education, research, policy making and investments which foster the use of trees on farms. It has a network of 31 affiliated entities in 23 countries. Its mission is to help ensure that all EU agricultural land has 10% tree-cover by 2040. Tree lines, individual trees, hedges and copses bring great environmental benefits including as buffer strips to improve ground-water quality. A range of EURAF Policy Briefings have been published (https://euraf.net/category/policy-briefings/) to explain the impact of agroforestry on European agricultural, forestry and climate policies, and Policy Briefing #65 Agroforestry for Pollution Control to Meet the Requirements of Article 14 of the EU Taxonomy Regulation 2020/8522 gives the scientific background for the use of strips of trees and shrubs to control pollution on agricultural land. It is available in draft format on https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XsqFv-iqb8gxXrlSk4VvU2yto9yIgWNq5xyCFJl3JAQ/edit#heading=h.gjdgxs
Read full responseResponse to New EU Forest Monitoring and Strategic Planning Framework
4 Feb 2024
The European Agroforestry Federation (www.euraf.net) is an NGO, which aims to promote the adoption of agroforestry practices across Europe by developing awareness, education, research, policy making and investments which foster the use of trees on farms. It has a network of 31 affiliated entities in 23 countries. It contributed to the original consultation with EURAF Policy Briefing #15, and revised this on 7.1.24.following publication of the draft FMR. (https://zenodo.org/record/7936686). This is the Summary:... Trees outside Forests (ToF) are greatly under-reported in EU and FAO statistics, and should have been included in the draft EU Forest Monitoring Regulation (FMR). ToF comprises 20-30% of tree-cover in the EU, and there is a need for consistent reporting of areas of copses, hedges, lines of trees and isolated trees in inventories of EU tree, timber and energy resources, and for integrated reporting of Greenhouse Gas emissions from the land sector as a whole (i.e. Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use). This requires clear national forest definitions and reliable rural-cadastres, to distinguish forest land from agricultural land. It does not require a unified definition of "forest" to be applied across Europe. Insistence in the draft Forest Monitoring Regulation on this single definition ignores the existing Forest Laws of most Member States, and the thresholds provided to the UNFCCC Secretariat. It also neglects the flexibility negotiated in the UNFCCC 2001 Marrakesh Accords. Forcing MS to have a single definition will hinder accurate GHG reporting by creating confusion on the boundary between forestry and agriculture. It also contradicts the existing EU acquis - expressed in Annex II of the LULUCF Regulation (2018/841). The FMR should therefore be amended to refer to forest definition in the 2018 LULUCF Regulation. Additionally, now that the communication on the 2040 emissions target for the land-sector has been published, we would like to further stress the crucial importance of making GHG emission estimates linked to land use databases rather than land cover approximations. If payment by result measures are really to be introduced as suggested in the Commissions Communication then it is important that farmers and foresters are able to demonstrate net-emission savings on their land in a way that connects to national estimates for forestland, cropland, grassland and settlements. The LPIS is a crucial system for this, and needs to be strengthened to work in parallel with LUCAS, Corine and Copernicus. Forcing a single EU definition of forest which has no relation to definitions used by Member States is a mistake.
Read full responseMeeting with Jorge Pinto Antunes (Cabinet of Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski)
8 Nov 2023 · Elaborate more on EURAF's priorities in the context of the work programme of the Commission for 2024.
Meeting with Katherine Power (Cabinet of Commissioner Mairead Mcguinness)
10 Oct 2023 · Agroforestry, sustainable finance, and forest monitoring
Response to 2040 Climate Target Plan
23 Jun 2023
This Policy Briefing is a contribution to the DG CLIMA consultation on 2040 climate targets. It suggests that, if the EU's target of 3 billion additional trees by 2030 were planted in agroforestry systems at the density of 150 (50-400) trees/ha, with 1 million ha planted each year to 2050, that a long-term average of 192 Mt CO2 yr-1 could be sequestered during the lifetime of the plantations. This is close to the current levels of LULUCF sequestration across the EU (212 Mt CO2e in 2021). However, trees grow slowly when they are first planted and the potential contribution of these agroforestry systems would take time to develop. Taking, for example, a generic agroforestry plantation at 150 trees/ha, a rotation length of 30 years, and 1 million hectares planted per annum across Europe from 2025 to 2050: it is estimated that sequestration would be only 2 Mt CO2 in 2030, but that this would rise to 81 Mt in 2030 and 188 Mt CO2 in 2050. Agroforestry can be carried out by planting trees in lines within parcels, or in hedges, windbreaks and copses at parcel boundaries. It is thought that this scale of planting is economically feasible on most of the 169 Million ha of agricultural land which exists in the Europe (EEA-39) with zero tree cover, and that any reductions in agricultural yield would be moderate, and compensated by carbon sequestration and other environmental or animal-welfare benefits. This Briefing is being sent to the Agricultural Departments of all Member States: it is hoped they take advantage of the EUs request that CAP Strategic Plans be revised to deliver on the new LULUCF targets. Agroforestry programmes are possibly the best option to achieve this. The full document can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8075187
Read full responseMeeting with Luke Ming Flanagan (Member of the European Parliament, Shadow rapporteur for opinion)
1 Feb 2023 · Nature Restoration law
Response to Carbon Removal Certification
2 May 2022
The European Agroforestry Federation (https://euraf.isa.utl.pt/) links organisations campaigning for agroforestry in 20 Member States (so far). Agroforestry is the integration of trees, crops and/or livestock on the same area of land. Trees can be inside parcels or on the boundaries (hedges). One of our Policy Briefings (#8 - Agroforestry for Climate Change Mitigation) has a section on Certification of Carbon Removals. The Briefing is attached as a PDF, and the latest version can be viewed on tiny.cc/48posz. Our main recommendations are:
A) Development (in conjunction with the JRC and Horizon Europe projects) of a range of farm-scale carbon calculator tools, based on best available data on land use and parcel boundaries in national IACS/LPIS systems, and closely integrated with the CAP FaST Platform. These will allow input of field measurements by farmers, and prediction of the effects of agroforestry and other sustainable farming practices on medium-term GHG emissions and other environmental benefits.
B) Use of existing best practice in certification methods in the voluntary carbon market, but reducing the cost and bureaucracy of these by closer integration with FaST Platform and peer-reviewed Carbon Calculator Tools.
C) Consistent adoption by Member States of IPCC Tier 3 (modelling) and Approach 3 (geospatial identification of parcels) in the calculation of national GHG emissions (AFOLU/LULUCF reporting), and open access to the datasets used in these calculations: so that farmers - and their advisors - can use similar methodologies to calculate farm-scale emissions.
D) Member States developing a time-series of sustained carbon farming support, starting with support for planning and establishment (through Ecoschemes), continued maintenance in initial years (through Pillar II) and longer term monetization (through voluntary schemes based on robust certification and/or possible inclusion of larger collaborative schemes in the EU ETS).
Read full responseResponse to New EU Forest Monitoring and Strategic Planning Framework
28 Apr 2022
The European Agroforestry Federation (https://euraf.isa.utl.pt/) links organisations campaigning for agroforestry in 20 Member States (so far). Agroforestry is the integration of trees, crops and/or livestock on the same area of land. Trees can be inside parcels or on the boundaries (hedges). The latest in our series of Policy Briefings (#15 - Monitoring Trees Outside the Forest in the EU) was produced as an input to this consultation. It is attached as a PDF, and the latest version can be viewed on tinyurl.com/bddnk3eu . Our main recommendations are:
1. Trees outside Forests (agroforestry and settlement forestry) are greatly under-reported and should be included in the new “EU Framework for Forest Monitoring” using harmonised methodologies based on Copernicus, LUCAS and LPIS datasets.
2. LULUCF/AFOLU reporting by Member States of the GHG emissions from cropland, grassland and settlements should use detailed information on tree cover and employ IPCC Tier3 and Approach 3 methods, rather than the Tier 1 methods still used by many MS. Countries should use “wall to wall” identification of parcels, allowing potential links to farm-scale modelling of emissions (e.g. using LPIS datasets).
3. Five EU Member States, which fund forestry from their ‘own resources’, (IR,NL,FI,SE,LU) will not record forestry or agroforestry indicators and targets in the CAP Performance, Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (PMEF). These indicators (R.17, R.34, O.15 and O.16) should nevertheless be used by these countries in the new “Forest Monitoring Framework”.
4. EU Regulations (such as the draft Deforestation Regulation) should refer to the definitions of “forest” supplied by Member States to the UNFCCC, rather than the more rigid and less realistic global definition used by the FAO.
Read full responseResponse to Land use, land use change and forestry – review of EU rules
23 Nov 2020
The European Agroforestry Federation (EURAF) represents organisations in 20 European States working to increase the use of trees on farms. These widely spaced trees, lines of trees and small copses are usually not on forest land, and we feed it necessary to improve the way in with Member States (and Associated States) report the impact of trees outside the forest on GHG emissions. They are largely ignored in current LULUCF/AFOLU reporting, yet there is huge scope use farm-trees as part of carbon-farming initiatives in Europe. Three steps are vital:
a) pre-identification of Landscape Features (groups of trees, lines of trees or isolated trees) by Member States in their IACS/LPIS systems - using the increasingly accurate remote sensing tools available through COPERNICUS (and elsewhere). This should be complete by January 2023.
b) confirmation of the location of these Landsacape Features by farmers in the subsequent IACS return.
c) all MS should start to use LPIS data for the identification of land use parcels (IPCC Approach 3), and move towards making their AFOLU emissions assumptions for each parcel and farm public by 2025.
In the LPIS the EU has the best and most detailed land-use tracking system in the world. There is a huge scope for downscaling from national AFOLU/LPIS reporting to integrate with current initiatives for farm-scale mapping of emissions and sequestration. BUT Member States need to be pushed hard by the Commission to improve the methods used to identify and monitor trees outside the forest. After all, satellite imagery is now available with pixel resulutions for 30 or 40 cm!
I am trying to attach a PDF file but it is not being accepted!! PLEASE accept the same file on tiny.cc/48posz
Read full response