EU agrees to delay anti-deforestation law by one year

The European Union’s new anti-deforestation rules will be delayed by one year but no major changes will be made to the content of the legislation, European decision makers agreed on Tuesday evening.

The result is a blow to the center-right European People’s Party, which had attempted to weaken the law — a key pillar of the Green Deal — as part of its push to lighten the regulatory burden on business.

The deal struck between European Parliament, the Council of the EU, and the European Commission on Tuesday means the Commission’s original proposal to delay the law  by one year stands. It will now come into force on Dec. 30, 2025.

But amendments proposed by the EPP and passed by the European Parliament have been abandoned, after they met with strong resistance from the Commission and EU member countries.

These amendments include a proposal to create a new “no risk” category that would reduce due diligence requirements for commodities sourced from areas at zero or negligible risk of deforestation. The Council of the EU had raised concerns about the compatibility of such a measure with World Trade Organization rules, and which POLITICO reported the EPP had finally dropped late last week.

That backtrack was not the first in the saga. Back in November, the EPP abandoned a number of more radical proposed reforms to the law, ahead of the November vote in Parliament. These included a two-year delay, and a suite of carve-outs that critics argued would have substantially weakened the law’s intended purpose of ensuring products sold within the EU do not contribute to global deforestation.

Still, in a concession to the EPP, the Commission on Tuesday agreed to look into how to simplify the regulation and reduce regulatory burden when the law is reviewed in 2028.

“The Commission will provide further clarifications and explore additional simplifications, and streamline reporting and document obligations, to keep them to a necessary minimum,” the agreed statement read.

The text will now go through a final vote in the Parliament’s environment committee and in plenary before it’s published in the EU Official Journal, and becomes law.