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Pracownia na rzecz Wszystkich Istot

Stowarzyszenie Pracownia na rzecz Wszystkich Istot (Association Workshop for All Beings) is a Polish environmental organisation established 30 years ago.

Lobbying Activity

Response to New EU Forest Monitoring and Strategic Planning Framework

6 May 2022

We welcome the European Commission’s (EC) initiative of an EU Framework for Forest Monitoring and Strategic Plans. EU forests are in a poor state. In the case of Poland, 28% of Natura 2000 forest habitats are deteriorating and 48% are in an unfavourable state, with forestry being the biggest threat to them. The state of the forests not protected under the EU law is most probably even worse, though it is hard to confirm it as there is no data allowing such comparisons. A well designed regulatory framework can help to reverse this trend by maximizing civil society’s capacity for monitoring forest management and its impact on the forests. To enable it proper data has to be gathered and accessible and mechanisms of civil supervision of forestry strengthened. Specifically, the new legislation should provide for: I. Participatory forest management and planning II. Unified framework for data collection III. Simplified access to relevant data I. Civil society should be able to monitor the compliance of forest management planning and practice with the law, requirements of nature conservation, climate change mitigation and adaptation. The EC’s declaration of its will „to support civil society’s role as a compliance watchdog” confirms its recognition of this necessity. The case of logging in Białowieża Forest, carried out by Poland in breach of the EU law and stopped only after an intervention of NGOs, is an example of the importance of the role the civil society has to play in monitoring forestry. In order for civil society to be able to fulfil this function in an efficient way, forest management in public forests should be carried out only based on approved forest management plans subject to public consultation, environmental impact assessment and review in a court of law. In appendix A we provide a case study from Poland considering this issue with specific recommendations for EU regulations included. II. At least the following data on all forests in the EU should be gathered: 1) Planned forestry activities: a) exact locations and dates of activities with the specification of the type of the planned activity (e.g. logging, planting, pesticide spraying etc.) b) information on the type, area, intensity etc.: - amount, species and size class of wood to be extracted - cutting system - the type of pesticide - species, number of trees and planting system - area of the intervention 2) The same information as listed above should be gathered for already realized forestry activities. For activities carried out before the introduction of the EU Forest Monitoring Framework, all available data on past activities should be made accessible. 3) Information on stands forest type, state and status: - habitat - species composition - structure and functions - naturalness - degradation level - deadwood stock - carbon stock and removal capacity - the amount of biomass and increment - forest’s origin - certification and forms of nature conservation - ecosystem services valuation - protected species (with the level of detail allowing to verify the correctness of environmental impact assessments) 4) Information on the use (e.g. material vs. energy) of extracted wood should be gathered. In Poland at the moment reliable data on the use of wood is not gathered (see Poland’s National Renewable Energy Action plann progress report for 2017-2018) making analysis of the impact of economic and regulatory drivers on the state of forests difficult. The destination of the wood extracted based on a particular logging permit should be monitored and publicly available (see Sumal (https://sumal-map.ro/auth/login) system introduced in Romania). III. Data should be available in open access online databases. It should be presented in a form allowing a non-expert user to understand it. Databases should be accessible with widely used software. It should be possible to download the data in a variety of widely used formats to allow carrying out analyses
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Meeting with Jorge Pinto Antunes (Cabinet of Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski), Maciej Golubiewski (Cabinet of Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski)

24 Sept 2021 · EU Forest Strategy / Polish forests

Meeting with Diederik Samsom (Cabinet of Executive Vice-President Frans Timmermans), Jori Keijsper (Cabinet of Executive Vice-President Frans Timmermans), Riccardo Maggi (Cabinet of Executive Vice-President Frans Timmermans) and

15 Jun 2021 · Biomass