Earth observation in national forest inventories: clear benefits yet marginal role—why?

European forests are undergoing rapid and unprecedented changes under climate pressure, yet the official information systems used to assess them—the national forest inventories (NFIs)—remain largely designed for periodic reporting rather than continuous monitoring, and struggle to provide the timely and spatially explicit information now required for adaptive and proactive climate-smart forest management. Critically, the EU’s recent attempt to establish a harmonized forest monitoring framework (Nabuurs 2026) failed as the Commission’s proposal for a new forest monitoring law was rejected by 370 votes to 264 (European Parliament 2025, 21 October). This is paradoxical: Earth observation (EO) could complement ground data by providing approximate but consistent, comparable, frequent, and wall-to-wall information on forest cover, change, and structure (White et al 2016). Why, then, is EO still not a central component of NFIs? What truly hampers the uptake of new technologies in official forest monitoring? This paper critically revisits the prevailing why-not arguments limiting the role of EO in NFIs and argues that several of these concerns warrant reconsideration in light of current evidence, technological maturity, and emerging monitoring demands.