Association of the Austrian Wood Industries

The Association of the Austrian Wood Industries welcomes the Commission's initiative to revise and simplify the delegated acts on the EU taxonomy. The delegated acts are quite difficult to apply and involve a high administrative burden for companies, especially SMEs. Please see comments in the enclosed file

The European Commissions initiative on affordable housing offers a good opportunity to promote sustainable development in the housing sector by providing low-carbon, biobased and energy-efficient housing solutions. The decarbonisation of housing in the European Union aims to make the building sector climate-neutral by 2050.

We welcome the initiative for a new EU Framework for Forest Monitoring and Strategic Plans. Indeed, a European forest monitoring system can help to strategically plan and swiftly react to ever-growing pressure from climate change on Europe's forests.

European forests are essential to achieve the target of -310 Mt CO2 in the LULUCF sector. In the form of wood, they are a renewable source of raw materials available across Europe, on which a strong value chain depends. However, this report shows that the health and sinking effects of forests are declining due to climate change and ageing, and that the sink effect has so far been greatly overestimated.

Filed in German · English published by the European Commission

We are pleased to have the opportunity to offer some views on the evaluation of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with Japan after five years of implementation. The objectives of teh agreement are to liberalise and facilitate trade and investment and promote a closer economic relationship between the EU and Japan.