EUDR: What Forestry Companies Must Do Before December 2026

The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) changes the rules for any company that produces, processes, or exports timber into the European Union. Unlike FLEGT or voluntary certifications, this is not optional — it's a legal requirement, backed by penalties and market access bans.

Who is affected, and from when

The regulation applies in two stages:

• 30 December 2026 for medium and large companies
• 30 June 2027 for micro and small companies

If your timber — raw, processed, or embedded in a finished product (furniture, panels, paper) — enters the European market, you're affected, regardless of where you operate.

What the EUDR actually requires

Three core obligations:

1. Geolocation of the plot of origin. For every batch of timber, you must be able to prove precisely where it came from — GPS coordinates of the harvesting plot, not just the country or region.
2. Proof of no deforestation. Demonstrate that the plot has not been deforested since 31 December 2020.
3. Due diligence statement. A formal document, filed in the EU system, gathering this evidence for every batch placed on the market.

The real challenge isn't legal, it's data

The legal side of the EUDR is clear. What trips up most companies is the operational question: how do you capture, store, and link this GPS data at every stage — from felling in the forest to shipment — especially when production sites sit in areas with limited or no connectivity.

That's exactly the problem I've been solving since 2006 for clients in the Republic of Congo and Cameroon: a traceability system that captures per-log geolocation from the source, runs without a permanent internet connection in the field, and centralizes the data to produce export documentation — now including EUDR due diligence statements.

What to do now

If your company doesn't yet have plot-level geolocation in place, the window to prepare before December 2026 is closing. The good news: if you already have harvest GPS data — even partial, even on paper or in a spreadsheet — compliance is often about structuring and linking what already exists, not starting from zero.

Let's talk about your EUDR traceability