Counting trees together in the EU

The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union (EU), has long sought to improve the monitoring of one of Europe's critical resources, its forests. Forests and the pressures they face need not acknowledge political boundaries, yet monitoring is scattered and heterogeneous, delivering an uncoordinated patchwork of outdated, incomplete information from across member states' individual monitoring efforts. However, in late 2025, the European Parliament rejected the proposed EU forest monitoring law that aimed at enhancing, harmonizing, and coordinating European forest monitoring. Despite this setback, the need for better monitoring and analysis at EU scale grows. New opportunities arise to create a workable and bottom-up solution.