Dr. Humberto Delgado Rosa:

I thank the Vice Chairman for bringing attention to the forest and forestry sector. The first point I will make is that there is a new EU forest strategy to run to 2030. It aims to respond to the fact that societal expectations regarding forestry nowadays relate more to climate and biodiversity as well as the bioeconomy. If we go back some decades, the main outcome we wanted from forestry was probably timber. Now we want timber along with the rest, that is, carbon sinks and biodiversity. The forestry strategy is tuned towards capturing the win-wins on several grounds. It does not go into detail but suggests some approaches to sustainable forestry management and forestry practices that focus on the win-wins for climate, biodiversity and wood and non-wood products from the forests. In that sense, much of what is in the pipeline for reshaping EU forests is not coming from the nature restoration law as such but from other documents that precede it. The nature restoration law is fully compatible with what is being done in the forest strategy, in the land use, land use change and forestry, LULUCF, regulation I referred to and in the upcoming forest monitoring law that is in preparation. To repeat what I said earlier, for forestry ecosystems in general, as opposed to those that are protected, we propose a positive trend of certain indicators. These indicators are not only related to biodiversity and climate. They are more related to forest resilience. They increase the resilience of forests. Increasing the resilience of forests amounts to favouring the production of forests. On afforestation in Ireland, there is nothing in the nature restoration law that predetermines what Ireland will do on afforestation. As I referred to before, we have some concerns and we have been discussing some types of afforestation with Ireland. I refer mainly to Sitka spruce afforestation, which is of questionable benefit from the angle of climate and carbon storage on some habitats or lands because peatland is the best form of storage there is. We are maintaining a dialogue on this with Ireland but the choice of afforestation option is Ireland's and can be fully tackled in harmony with the nature restoration law.