When a Georgia landowner plants a pine stand, the decision rests on a straightforward calculation: Will there be a buyer for that wood in 25 or 30 years?

For generations, the answer in the U.S. South has been a confident yes. But today, a constellation of forces originating far from southern timberlands — in Brussels boardrooms, Geneva standard-setting bodies and corporate sustainability offices worldwide — is quietly redrawing the terms of market access. And unlike traditional regulations, these forces often arrive without a public comment period, a legislative vote, or even a clear point of contact for the people they affect most.

Much of the global sustainability architecture — the standard-setting bodies, research initiatives and compliance frameworks that increasingly govern market access — is underwritten by European governments and financial institutions, giving one region’s assumptions about forest management an outsized influence on producers worldwide.

​Insights from three experts who operate at the intersection of forests and global policy paint a picture of an industry confronting an interconnected web of voluntary standards, carbon accounting disputes and trade regulations that, while well-intentioned, risk undermining the very forest steward - ship they claim to promote.

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The Carbon Accounting Puzzle
Forest carbon accounting sounds technical, and it is. But its consequences are practical and far-reaching. At its core, it is the practice of measuring how much carbon dioxide forests absorb, store and release when wood is harvested and used.

For Georgia’s forestry sector — which exports significant volumes through the Port of Savannah — how that carbon is counted can determine whether markets open or close.

“Forest carbon accounting really means a lot of different things,” said Jane Alonso, a forest carbon accounting consultant and former VP of government relations at the National Alliance of Forest Owners
(NAFO), outlining three key dimensions: voluntary versus mandatory reporting, project-based accounting for a specific forest area versus annual inventory reporting across an entire ownership, and private company-level accounting versus government-level inventories.

A landowner participating in a carbon exchange must follow that market’s rules; a large manufacturer does companywide carbon inventories for investors, an entirely separate exercise. “The sector has a great story to tell,” Alonso said. “If it’s being done in the right way, it could open markets—or keep markets open—for that wood being exported from Georgia. Or it could shut down those opportunities.”

The frameworks shaping those opportunities increasingly originate outside of government. The Greenhouse
Gas (GHG) Protocol, perhaps the most widely recognized voluntary carbon accounting framework in the world,
has been developing a Land Sector and Removals standard for years. In early 2026, the GHG Protocol published that standard without including forestry — a decision that stunned much of the sector. Although the protocol is voluntary, its influence extends into the regulatory arena: Alonso noted that we have already seen legislation enacted in
the State of California and introduced at the federal level in Canada that would require companies to report their greenhouse gas emissions according to some type of GHG Protocol standard requirement.

“The problems amplify when you start seeing governments adopting the requirements of a non-governmental group in
public policy,” Alonso said, “where you’re mixing in a non-governmental group and their requirements with mandatory
requirements. Even in Georgia, where the state government is friendly to industry, ​you just never know what happens with elections and legislatures. You’ve got to keep your eye on it.”

​The risk, in other words, is that a voluntary framework that currently excludes forestry could become the default standard adopted by regulators, investors or trading partners — leaving the sector without a recognized way to get credit for the carbon work forests are already doing. Alonso stressed the importance of keeping multiple pathways available. “You want to keep optionality on the table,” she said, “and be on the lookout for any kind of mandates around how carbon accounting is done.”

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A Global Wind at the National Door
If carbon accounting is one piece of the puzzle, the broader landscape of international sustainability standards is the frame that holds it all together. Ross Hampton, who co-founded the International Sustainable Forestry Coalition (ISFC) with Dr. David Brand after a decade leading Australia’s national forestry association, said the organization exists precisely because global-level decisions were blindsiding national forestry sectors before they had a chance to respond.

“The regulatory environment that we work in at a national level is profoundly influenced by what is taking place at a suprapolitical level,” Hampton said. Principles adopted at venues like the World Economic Forum, OECD or UN climate conferences set what he called “the wind that we have to sail through.” Those principles eventually translate into international agreements that flow into national regulation, often without input from the people who manage forests for a living.

A core problem, Hampton explained, is that many of the people shaping global forestry standards understand only one type of forest system, typically European. “The U.S. South’s way of doing forestry is fantastic,” he said. “It’s certified, sustainable, regulated heavily, under a legal framework. But it doesn’t necessarily look the same as a European forest system.” When standards are written by people who only know one model, the results can be deeply mismatched with the reality of working forests in the American Southeast.

Hampton sees enormous opportunity in the emerging conversation around nature and ecosystem services. Forestry estates, he argued, are vastly undervalued because they deliver clean water, clean air, biodiversity habitat, recreational amenity and a range of other ecosystem services — most of which landowners are not compensated for. “Analysts say forestry estates could be worth many times their timber and fiber value once these internal values are externalized,” he said. Eighteen ISFC members are now piloting a project across 21 countries to measure and value seven ecosystem services consistently and, hopefully, build the foundation for genuine nature markets.

But he warned that the sector’s experience with carbon should serve as a cautionary tale. Pricing for forest carbon sequestration can range from $2 to $200 globally, and the lack of a coherent measurement system has hobbled the market for years. With nature markets still in their infancy, the sector has a window to help set the rules rather than merely react to them. “If we can bring to governments a consistent framing of how we measure things like freshwater flows,” Hampton said, “then we’ve got the foundation they need to build out a global approach.”

The EUDR: A Cautionary Tale in Real Time
No discussion of non-regulatory barriers would be complete without the European Union Deforestation Regulation, or EUDR. While technically a regulation, the EUDR illustrates what happens when well-intended environmental policy collides with the market-driven reality of U.S. forestry.

Kate Gatto, chief strategy officer at NAFO, was direct: “We are not the target of this law, but we are collateral damage.”

The EUDR requires that any wood or fiber entering the European market be proven deforestation- and degradation-free. In principle, this is something the U.S. could easily demonstrate — forest cover has been stable since the 1960s, and an overlapping system of sustainability assurances is already in place. “Our system is working,” Gatto said. “It’s just not the system they are projecting on the rest of the world.”

The problem lies in implementation. The EUDR demands complete supply chain transparency down to the individual landowner, including detailed geolocation polygons of harvest units. Large landowners can absorb the expense, but for family forest owners — like Gatto’s own family, who own a tree farm in Mississippi managed by relatives in their 70s and 80s — the burden is simply unrealistic. “Why do you need a detailed polygon of a har - vest unit in a low-risk country where you already know the risk for deforestation is negligible?” she asked.

Perhaps most paradoxically, the EUDR’s narrow definition of deforestation, focused on conversion from forest to agricultural use, misses the actual conversion threat in the United States. Forest-to-agriculture conversion runs roughly 0.02% annually; the real pressure comes from development as urban areas expand. Under the EUDR, cutting down a forest for a solar farm or subdivision is perfectly compliant.

The deeper risk, Gatto warned, is that compliance burdens could drive the very deforestation the law aims to prevent. “If the European Union is making it harder for small landowners to sell their harvests, what we will see over time is conversion of forest to another land use,” she said. “The law as designed and being implemented in the United States is doing exactly the opposite of what it set out to do.” Gatto also cautioned that the EUDR is not the only source of compliance pressure. Many companies carry non-conversion commitments through voluntary programs like the Science Based Targets initiative or FSC certification. Industry coalitions like the Consumer Goods Forum — whose member companies represent trillions of dollars in annual revenue — further shape what the marketplace considers sustainable, setting procurement expectations that ripple back through supply chains to individual landowners. Contract language from mills often reflects the broadest of these commitments. “Everybody is very mad about EUDR,” Gatto said, “but a lot of the non-conversion commitments have nothing to do with EUDR.”

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We have to show up in the right forums where the rules are being written. If decisions are made without forest owners at the table, they’re almost guaranteed to be bad.” — Kate Gatto, Chief Strategy Officer, NAFO

What Georgia’s Forestry Community Should Do Now
​Across all three conversations, a consistent message emerged: the forestry sector has a great story to tell, but it must be told in the right rooms at the right time.

“We have to show up in the right forums where the rules are being written,” Gatto said. “If decisions are made without forest owners at the table, they’re almost guaranteed to be bad.” Hampton echoed this: “Trying to fix it when it lands on your doorstep is hugely difficult. But if you can get involved near the beginning of the process, you find a lot more goodwill and opportunity to ‘adjust the steering wheel.’”

Alonso urged stakeholders to keep optionality front and center. With the GHG Protocol having failed to deliver a usable forestry standard, the sector must ensure no single flawed system becomes the default. Alternatives exist, including ISO standards and the USDA’s entity-level guidance, but none yet offer a one-stop solution for the full value chain. For landowners, understanding what the EUDR actually requires, and how it differs from broader voluntary commitments, provides critical negotiating leverage in contracts.

The forests that blanket Georgia exist because markets have given landowners a reason to grow them. Those forests deliver clean water, clean air, wildlife habitat, carbon storage and tens of thousands of jobs — benefits that extend far beyond the landowner’s property line. The challenge ahead is ensuring that the global standards increasingly shaping market access actually reward the stewardship that produces those benefits, rather than penalizing the people who practice it. ■


John Casey is a strategic communications professional who supports clients through the art of storytelling. In his downtime, John can be found hunting and fishing on his family’s centennial farm in Northwest Georgia.