EU Forest Policy Database (1960-2025)

Policy documents were identified through a search on EUR-Lex, the official database of EU law and policy documents (https://eur-lex.europa.eu). The screening was conducted through a two-step process: First, policy documents (e.g., regulations, directives), treaties, international agreements, staff working documents, communications, and reports were selected that mentioned "forests". In this step, we identified 15,545 documents for the time frame from 1965 to 2025 (see supplementary materials). Second, each document was reviewed to verify whether it addressed forests directly. For example, the staff working document "Security Industrial Policy" (SWD(2012)233) only addresses forests in the context of fire alarms. In such cases, the document was excluded from the analysis. In addition, policy proposals (e.g., regulations) were generally not included, except in some cases (e.g., initial proposals for an EU forest policy that were never adopted). It was further decided to limit the sample to 100 documents per decade to make it more manageable, also reflecting that it was not possible to find so many documents between 1960 and 1980.