The climate targets for the LULUCF (land use, land-use change and forestry) sector are divided into two time periods for 2021 to 2030: 2021-2025 and 2026-2030.

While 2030 is still a long way off, and much can change, as country representatives have pointed out, Estonia is struggling to meet the first period's requirements: it will be locked in at the end of next year, and the calculation of how much carbon Estonia's forests, fields, and grasslands sequester in 2021-2025 will begin.

Although the official conclusions will be made in 2027, it is already clear that Estonia will not meet its target and will have to prepare for an expenditure of several hundred million euros.

Estonia's positions on LULUCF were approved by the government and the EU affairs committee of the Riigikogu in the fall of 2016. These included, for example, the wish for a member state to be able to develop a nationally specific approach to calculating the reference level of forest area under management. Estonia also wanted LULUCF, or the land use and forestry sector, to be treated separately from the rest of climate policy, and for forest-rich member states like Estonia to be given a solution that takes their specificities into account in the baseline methodology.

The goal of limiting carbon emissions to sequestration between 2021 and 2025 or 2026 and 2030 was already a concern for Estonia.

The national positions issued in 2016 said that attaining this aim would be challenging because, over the last 50 years, the extent of forest land and forest stock rose while the utilization of new forest land and forest increment reduced.

"There are many more mature stands than optimal, with a third of forests currently meeting the current criteria for regeneration and a further 10 percent expected to do so in the coming years. As a result of the increasing proportion of mature stands, the growth potential of forest land is being used less and less. If this situation continues, Estonia's forests will be threatened by declining regrowth and decreasing carbon sequestration capacity," the document said.

That there would be problems was already known in 2017.

The main agreement on the regulation took place in the second half of 2017, when Estonia held the presidency of the Council of the European Union. The fact that the presidency's task is to find a solution that is satisfactory to all member states meant that Estonia, as the presiding country at the time, could not directly defend its own interests, the Climate Ministry told ERR.

However, this does not mean that issues of importance to Estonia were not discussed, as there are other countries in a similar situation to Estonia, the ministry added. First and foremost was Finland, which is also rich in forests and whose various amendments had already been supported by Estonia.

The ministry said that the advantage of the Estonian presidency is that, thanks to its expertise, Estonia can offer solutions to the problems of forest-rich countries, such as a compensation mechanism.

However, it was already known in Estonia at that time that there might be problems in meeting the agreed targets, but since the agreement was rather general, it was hoped that by clarifying the regulation the conditions could be made more favorable.

"At the time of the agreement, there was a risk that Estonia might face problems in meeting its climate commitments in the LULUCF sector by 2030, but the regulation set general rules and the details were dealt with later. One of our principles was that forest owners should not be penalized by climate commitments for managing their forests sustainably and that it is the role of the state to find solutions for a balanced climate policy," Laura Remmelgas, head of the climate department at the Ministry of Climate, said.

On LULUCF, an agreement was reached with the European Parliament on December 13, 2017, and the final text was approved almost unanimously (with only Poland opposing) by Coreper (committee of the permanent representatives of the governments of the member states to the European Union), on December 20 of the same year. Estonia's environment minister at the time was Siim Kiisler, who was still a member of Isamaa.

The details were worked out in subsequent years. However, the targets that countries were expected to meet were set using data from 2016-2018. Based on this data, Estonia was still doing well, with a net sequestration of three metric tons of CO₂, meaning that more carbon was sequestered than emitted.

At the beginning of the new decade, the unfortunate fact emerged that while Estonia had always been a CO₂ sink with its forests, in 2020 statistics showed that it had become a CO₂ emitter.

In June 2022, Urmas Kruuse, who was the acting Minister of Environment, attended the meeting of European Union Environment Ministers to present Estonia's views.

After the meeting, Estonia's Permanent Representative Marten Kokk explained that, at Estonia's request, a number of flexibilities and compensation mechanisms had been introduced in the draft text. However, these already concerned the next calculation period, i.e., the years 2026 to 2030.

Among other things, the draft includes a clause on exceptional natural disasters, which Estonia wants to see, allowing a member state to exclude greenhouse gas emissions in the case of damage caused by storms, forest fires, floods or even typhoons, for example, if these disruptions result in significantly higher emissions than the historical average.

In November 2022, then Environment Minister Madis Kallas said that Estonia no longer had much chance of getting favorable changes in the European Union's agreement on climate targets for land use, land use change and forestry, but that it would try to introduce more flexibility and compensation mechanisms in the event of natural disasters.

In March last year, the European Parliament adopted amendments to the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) Regulation, increasing the 2030 CO₂ sequestration target by 15 percent.

The new net greenhouse gas sequestration target for the LULUCF sector for 2030 is set at 310 million tons of CO2 equivalent. As a result, the EU's greenhouse gas emissions are expected to fall by around 57 percent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, instead of the 55 percent previously planned.

At the same time, the rules will remain in place until 2025, requiring member states to ensure that emissions from the LULUCF sector do not exceed CO₂ levels. For the period 2026-2029, EU countries will have a four-year budget instead of the current binding annual targets.

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