Geographical policy maps - deadwood management

National forest legislation has a long history in many European Member States (EU-MS) and has had a significant impact on the governance of forests across Europe over time. The EU Nature Restoration Regulation (NRR) stipulates directly applicable and legally binding forest restoration targets and indicators, making a transposition into national legislation redundant. Nevertheless, it can be assumed that a certain degree of compatibility with national forest legislation will be crucial to ensure a successful and coherent implementation of National Forest Restoration Plans (NRPs) and progress towards the selected forest ecosystem restoration indicators. Incoherencies between the NRR forest ecosystem restoration targets and indicators and national legal forest frameworks on the other hand are likely to pose a challenge to a successful implementation in the years to come.

Against this backdrop, we conducted in-depth analyses of national forest laws and related legislation and, based on that, create forest restoration policy maps to provide an overview on how certain forest ecosystem indicators and respective management practices included in the NRR are currently regulated or promoted in different EU countries. These policy maps summarize if and to what extent national forest laws and related legislation refer to the forest ecosystem indicators stipulated by the NRR by building country categories based on the findings from the legal analysis. Based on this, conclusions are drawn on the status of vertical coherence of EU forest restoration policy, particularly as stipulated under the NRR, and the national forest regulatory frameworks of the EU-MS. This policy coherence assessment is expected to inform the development of supportive forest policy and legal frameworks both at the EU and national levels, thereby supporting the development and implementation of the NRPs in the years to come.

This report presents the key findings from the analysis of regulatory provisions across the 27 EU Member States (plus the United Kingdom) concerning deadwood management, the amount of which has significantly increased over the past 25 years, most likely due to the increasing occurrence of forest disturbances (Forest Europe, 2020).