Authors: Deparnay-Grunenberg, Anna;

Forests cover 40% of European territories, providing diverse provisioning, regulating, supporting and cultural ecosystem services. Climate change, biodiversity loss and intensive forestry practices pose huge challenges to forests, leading the European Union (EU) to recently adopt ambitious policies including the European Green Deal, the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2030 and the European Forest Strategy 2030. These policies contain normative policy objectives of a transformative move towards enhanced climate protection, biodiversity conservation and sustainable forest bioeconomy. Nevertheless, the EU Forest Strategy remains a non-binding agreement, that MS do not have to follow, due to the subsidiarity principle and the lack of recognition of European competences on Forests. Still, the Commission works on defining close-to-nature forestry practices and develop common best practices. The large number of laws, regulations and initiative reports influencing the forests in Europe is huge, and no harmonization can happen if the competences of the EU on forests are not recognized. Based on the diagnostic of barriers and potentials it is possible to show the way forward to reach harmonised regulations and how to experience a real shift towards more forest conservation and real sustainable forest management in the EU.