The European Commission has welcomed the provisional political agreement reached between the European Parliament and the Council regarding targeted amendments to the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). The proposal aims to ensure clarity and predictability concerning the entry into application and the requirements for economic operators.
EUDR Implementation Delay Clarified
The agreed amendments are designed to reduce the data load on the IT system, ensuring it can handle the expected due diligence statements and simplified declarations submitted by all operators. This adjustment is considered necessary to provide a well-functioning IT system for the smooth implementation of the EUDR. The Commission emphasised the need to ensure the regulation delivers results on the ground, noting that global deforestation and forest degradation account for 10 per cent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions and represent one of the most urgent challenges of the current era.
A central component of the provisional political agreement is the inclusion of an additional year for economic operators to prepare before the EUDR enters into application. The new timeline sets the entry into application date to 30 December 2026 for large and medium operators. For micro and small operators, the date has been moved to 30 June 2027. However, for micro and small operators already covered by the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR), the entry into application will be 30 December 2026.
The agreement also outlines streamlined obligations for downstream operators and traders. These entities will no longer be required to submit due diligence statements or pass reference numbers further along the supply chain. Instead, only the first downstream actor will be responsible for obtaining a due diligence reference number.
Furthermore, a simplified one-off declaration has been introduced for micro and small primary operators sourcing from low-risk countries. This replaces the previous requirement for due diligence statement submissions in the IT system. Where the required information is already available in databases established under EU or Member State legislation, and Member States make the relevant data available in the EUDR IT system, these micro and small primary operators are exempted from submitting the simplified declaration. The amendments also remove books, newspapers, and printed material from the scope of EUDR products.
The European Parliament and the Council must now formally adopt the targeted amendments to the EU Deforestation Regulation before they take effect.
The EUDR aims to ensure that specific key goods placed on the EU market do not contribute to deforestation and forest degradation globally. Deforestation and forest degradation are significant drivers of climate change and biodiversity loss. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that 420 million hectares of forest, an area larger than the European Union, were lost to deforestation between 1990 and 2020.
Since the EUDR entered into force in June 2023, the Commission has worked with stakeholders to facilitate a simple, fair, and cost-efficient implementation. This has included setting up the necessary framework through additional guidance and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) documents published in April 2025, as well as the Benchmarking Implementing Regulation published in May 2025.
The Commission has also undertaken simplification efforts estimated to lead to a 30 per cent reduction in administrative costs and burdens for companies. In December 2024, the European Union granted a 12-month additional phasing-in period, initially setting the applicability dates to 30 December 2025 for large and medium companies and 30 June 2026 for micro and small enterprises, before this latest agreement.
