EUDR May Be Delayed, But American Hardwood Assured Platform Still Important
On September 23rd, news broke that the European Union is strongly considering another delay to the implementation of the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which was set to go into effect on December 30, 2025. IT issues with the system used to track the enormous volume of data required under the law are causing the EU to push back implementation for another year. EU Environment Commissioner, Jessika Roswall, proposed the delay to improve the IT platform, as the system was reportedly not able to handle management of compliance data and was regularly slowing down to a crawl and crashing.
The EUDR requires harvest data down to the “real estate unit,” and for the last two years the American Hardwood Export Council has communicated with the European Union to stress concerns about the volume of data that has to be provided in the context of the American hardwood forest. The issue of data volume is clearly one that the EU is looking to solve over the next year, and the recently launched American Hardwood Assured (AHA) platform provides a streamlined solution while meeting the objectives of preventing deforestation around the globe. The AHA platform, available now to all U.S. companies at www.hardwood.us, can quickly create a statement showing that hardwood products are legally sourced and deforestation-free, and are a ready solution for streamlining data managed through the EU information system.
Each AHA Statement includes all the data required to confirm negligible risk of illegal harvesting and deforestation and identifies the potential harvest area by county (selected by the exporter) for each species in the consignment. The statement can be downloaded as a pdf and sent with other shipping documentation, and the GPS coordinates can be saved in the GeoJSON format required by the EUDR. The county-level GPS data allows us to compress the volume of data managed by the EU Information System, while still tracing material back to an area with negligible risk of deforestation.
If you haven’t already done so, you can sign up for your free company account as a U.S. hardwood exporter on the AHA website (www.hardwood.us) and start creating due diligence deforestation-free documentation and county-level GPS data for your customers. Through USDA and AHEC Member support, this platform is free for U.S. companies to use through the end of 2026.
There are currently over 100 companies using the system including lumber, log, veneer, stave, and butcher block exporters, and the more companies that use AHA the more unified our message that American hardwoods are deforestation-free and legally sourced.
The American Hardwood Assured platform solves a serious issue posed by the current structure of the EUDR. 73 percent of global forests are government owned and harvested through concession areas that serve as the point of origin. As an example, in the Republic of the Congo the average concession area is 600,000 acres. In the United States, over 90 percent of hardwood products come from private land, averaging less than 27 acres. This means the average hardwood producer in the U.S. is sourcing from thousands of real estate units every year, a level of data that is overwhelming for the EU information system. For pulp, paper, and residual products, the number of properties can be even higher.
Moreover, the testing methods the EU plans to use to enforce this law like stable isotope ratio analysis are great for tracking products back to large harvest concessions but are not accurate enough to trace back to a single real estate unit in the U.S. There are serious questions about how the EU can enforce the law on the level they are requiring, and any law that can’t be effectively enforced is bound to be abused.
Shifting to a county-level “micro-jurisdiction” simplifies the data collection and actually allows the EU to enforce this law and fight global deforestation.
Once users have registered for the American Hardwood Assured platform, training videos, user guides and FAQ’s are all accessible on the website. If you need further assistance, please reach out to the AHEC team or the general help email: help@hardwood.us.
