Tree restoration potential in the European Union

Inspired by the report and the European Union’s new Green Deal, the European Commission Directorate General for Environment (DG ENV) requested the FAO Climate and Biodiversity Department to prepare a detailed report for the potential of land restoration in the European Union. The expected outputs include:

• Output 1: The preparation and publication of a report on “Tree restoration potential in the European Union” (this report);
• Output 2: Participation in the International Conference on Forests, Biodiversity and Climate Change and present the preliminary result of the report; and
•Output 3: Sharing preliminary data and results of the EU specific report on tree restoration potential through a pre-agreed platform and open-data policy for country evaluation and feedback.

Responding to the need of a specific EU context, EU specific datasets on climate, soil, land-cover, forests, land-use and biodiversity are used as input data in the model developed by FAO. The project implementation strategy therefore relies on using EU specific datasets on climate (The Climate Data Store), soil (Soil Atlas of Europe), EU CORINE land-cover, forests (Forest Information System for Europe),
land-use (LUCAS EUROSTAT) and biodiversity (Biodiversity Information System for Europe) as input data to the model developed by FAO. This report was prepared by FAO in partnership with the Ghent University (supported by Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) and with the support of the ENEL Foundation.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations