Under the Swedish Chairmanship, FOREST EUROPE is working to improve the consistency and comparability of reporting on quantitative indicators for Sustainable Forest Management, as a foundation for credible, policy-relevant forest data and informed decision-making at national and pan-European levels.

Our latest report presents the first step in a roadmap developed to address these challenges: a technical analysis of reporting rates from the Joint Pan-European Data Collection 2025. It lays the groundwork for more robust forest statistics and more effective policy responses.

This work highlights the importance of comparable data across countries and over time to strengthen transparency, support accountability, and enable evidence-based policymaking.

“The report concludes that there is a wide variation in reporting rates across FOREST EUROPE regions, and that measures to improve reporting should be tailored to specific challenges rather than general approaches,” says Rebecca Hunt, Workstream Project Manager at the Liaison Unit Sweden, and continues:

“One key observation is that many country reports do not distinguish between a reported zero and cases where no data is available. This is something we will address in the next step. The usability of the reported data would increase significantly if this distinction were clarified in future reporting.”