European Parliament vote deepens chaos around EUDR implementation

Posted on November, 26 2025

The timing of this decision could hardly be worse, revealing the EU’s empty promises to the environment.

Following the Council’s push to weaken and postpone the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), the European Parliament just voted to further undermine the regulation by excluding printed products, such as newspapers and books, from its scope.

“What started as an IT issue has morphed into a chaotic and unmanageable situation. The European Commission must urgently clean up this mess and take back control,” said Anke Schulmeister - Oldenhove, Policy Manager for Forests at WWF European Policy Office.

Indeed, the proposal on the table betrays prior negotiations on the EUDR. When the European Commission flagged IT problems as a potential obstacle to the application of the regulation in October, policy-makers should have focused on fixing a technical issue to move forward. Instead, the matter has been seized upon by the Council and Parliament as a pretext to reopen the file, weaken it and create massive uncertainty around EUDR implementation.

Both institutions have demanded a review of a regulation that has yet to be applied. The move is both premature and irresponsible, and made all the more troubling because there will be no real-world experience of how the EUDR functions to inform such a review.

EU policy-makers just returned from Belém, where they reasserted their commitment to address the escalating climate crisis, only to focus on how to kill EU climate laws at home. The EU seems to be under the dangerous impression that there is still time to act. The destruction of the Amazon and other critical ecosystems is already undermining Europe’s climate stability, economic resilience and biodiversity, even if the damage is not yet fully visible.

In fact, wrapping this decision in the language of “competitiveness” is both short-sighted and baseless. There is no evidence that delaying and weakening the EUDR will improve company profitability. On the contrary, many companies have already invested heavily in compliance and sustainability, only to be penalised for acting early and responsibly.

“The approach adopted today represents a complete withdrawal from responsibility towards future generations, who will bear the cost of delayed action,” said Schulmeister-Oldenhove. “The Commission needs to learn from this lesson: it must stop the dismantling of the EUDR and the Environmental Omnibus. All hell will break loose with more simplification.”

We call on the European Commission to bring the EU Deforestation Regulation back on track and refrain from further deregulation of environmental and climate laws.

Forest destruction is already undermining Europe’s climate stability.