Mitigating climate change through well-managed EU forests and land: a provisional agreement with Parliament | WPN World People News

On 14 December, the Estonian presidency and the European Parliament reached an informal agreement on the land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) regulation. This will help reduce overall EU greenhouse gas emissions over the 2021-2030 period through the better protection and management of land and forests across the Union. EU ambassadors will assess this provisional deal with a view to endorsing it on 20 December 2017.

Overall, the sectors which fall outside the scope of the EU emissions-trading system (ETS) are required to contribute a 30% emissions cut by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.

The new regulation provides a framework for ensuring that emissions and removals generated by this sector are accounted for. This will enable the EU to reach its Paris agreement target to cut emissions by at least 40% by 2030.

The text of the agreement provides robust EU-wide accounting rules for LULUCF activities, developed to ensure the proper and consistent accounting of emissions and removals from 2021-2030. As a compromise, and given the lack of current data on wetlands, accounting for this sector will become mandatory for the 2026-2030 period, unless it is found appropriate to postpone the mandatory inclusion by five years in light of the experience gained with the use of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) refinement to the 2006 guidelines for national greenhouse gas inventories.

The 'no-debit rule' remains the cornerstone element of the regulation. This is a binding commitment whereby all member states will have to guarantee that their total emissions from this sector are in balance and do not exceed CO₂ removals. Afforestation and enhanced supervision of national forests, croplands and grasslands are examples of ways to generate further carbon absorption.

A new EU governance process has been devised for the determination of national forest management reference levels. It has been decided that those levels will be set on the basis of the historical reference period from 2000 to 2009.

The new regulation includes the flexibilities suggested in the original proposal to help member states meet their 'no-debit' commitments.

The specific circumstances of member states will be catered for by the additional managed forest land flexibility proposed by the Council.

This new compensation mechanism will contain up to 360 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent and will be available to all member states over the 2021-2030 period.

A number of strict conditions must be fulfilled for its use, in order to preserve the environmental integrity of the regulation. Compliance with the 'no-debit rule' by the EU as a whole is the most important of all. Furthermore, EU countries may only receive compensation on the condition that their national forests still generate a sink and up to a pre-established amount calculated for each member state on the basis of their average sink over the 2000-2009 period.

Both co-legislators have agreed to grant additional compensation of 10 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent to Finland for the 2021-2030 period in recognition of the country's special circumstances in this sector.

Timeline and next steps
The European Commission presented two proposals on the sectors not covered by the ETS – effort sharing and LULUCF – in July 2016 on the basis of the guidelines provided by the European Council in its October 2014 conclusions.

Discussions on non-ETS sectors took place in parallel within the Council due to the numerous links between the two proposals. These files were on the agenda of three Environment Council meetings before a negotiating position was agreed: a policy debate on 17 October 2016, a state-of-play briefing on 19 December 2016 and a progress report in June 2017.

The Council reached its general approach on 13 October 2017 and started negotiations shortly afterwards with the European Parliament, which adopted its position on 13 September 2017 during its plenary session.

Two other trilogues on 19 October and 22 November 2017 paved the way for negotiations to be concluded on December 14. The provisional text will be presented to EU ambassadors for analysis and endorsement on 20 December 2017.

The formal adoption of this legislation will only occur once an agreement is found in the effort sharing regulation given the links between both legislative acts.

Source: European Council Council of the European Union