Investigating Main Trends of the EU Forest Policy and Law Development

Abstract

If the area of the world’s forests will continue to decline as fast as it does now, then after just 775 years, humanity risks losing all the forests on Earth. Among other causes of deforestation, international experts cite as a reason the imperfection of the national legislation. In contrast to the global trend, the European Union (EU) forest area has been increasing for more than 60 years. This fact allows one to make an assumption on the effectiveness of the EU policy and law in the field of forestry. The article analyzes the major tendencies in the development of the EU legislation in the field of forestry and examines the perspectives of its development until 2020. In the course of the study, the author used a variety of research methods that makes it possible to profoundly analyze the process of integration of the EU legislation in the field of forestry: synthesis, generalization, comparison, deductive and inductive methods, historical and legal, comparative legal methods in combination with a comprehensive and systematic analysis. The EU policy and law in the field of forestry are rarely the subject of scientific reflection and therefore remain insufficiently explored. This article is one of the first papers to holistically describe tendencies of the development of the EU policy and law in the field of forestry, defining the objective conditions of their occurrence and the need for integration. The effectiveness of the EU policy and law in the field of forestry today is the result of a gradual and phased integration to solve the pressing issues (climate change, forest industry development, bio-energy, green economy, promotion of research in the field of forestry, etc.) during the period of more than fifty years.