EUSTAFOR – 20 Years Celebration Conference and General Assembly, a Great Success

EUSTAFOR celebrated its 20th anniversary this past 15 – 16th of April marking two decades as the voice of Europe’s state forest management organisations and a key contributor to EU forest policy. This year celebrations combined reflection on past achievements with a forward-looking agenda, including a new strategic vision, public engagement activities, and a high-level policy conference in Brussels with a more than 120 attendees from close to 30 European countries from Ukraine and the Balkans to Western Europe, Norway and the UK.

1️⃣ Starting with our General Assembly cose to 70 people came to the Permanent Representation of Hungary to the European Union. Splendid hosts that made all the event fly smoothly topped with wonderful Hungarian cuisine.

• Our members decided on our priorities for this year as well as voted on the new internal auditors and finance
• We also had the pleasure to have a thematic discussion on Birds directive by the hand of the European Commission
• We concluded with the adoption of our new EUSTAFOR strategy 2026+ by the hand of our skilled Roland Kautz

2️⃣ On the second day we hosted our celebration conference with more than 120 attendees, with the opening by Commissioner Christophe Hansen and a keynote speech by Robert Mavsar from European Forest Institute setting the scene for our two panels where Andreas Eriksson, Gaelle MARION, Gary Healy, Jedrzej Damski, Katri Kulmuini, Jose Almodovar Araez, Fanny Pomme Langue, Christine Farcy, Diego Benedetti, Elodie Champseix and Johan Elvnert discussed past and future EU forest policy. 

All was perfectly managed and hosted by our dear friends at the 🇵🇱 Permanent Representation of the Republic of Poland to the European Union with an outstanding lunch filled with Polish food. 

🌳 We gained energy to finalise our day at the Sonian forest. As our expert forester and guide for a day Frederik Vaes put it, foresters should be in the Forest  and we loved it. Hosted by the Sonian Forest Foundation, Caroline Celis and Frederik taught, us under the close eye of the Beech trees and Oaks, how the Brussels region manages such spectacular forest. The cherry on the top of a 2 day program full of events!

💚 Thank you to all that made it possible! we enter our new decade with renewed energy and clearly with a lot of good people around 💚

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