Answering common questions around EUDR guidelines and documentation

Under EUDR, can a statewide risk assessment be used in place of “documents” for each specific harvest site to confirm negligible illegality risk?

The short answer is yes, based on AHA’s reading of the EUDR legal text and the legal advice that AHA has received. In the context of U.S. hardwood products, the provision of risk information at a jurisdictional level is necessary both to preserve the effectiveness of EUDR and to avoid conflict with the EU's own laws on proportionality, privacy and the right to carry out a business, and with the EU's international trade obligations. 

The provision of property level documentation is practically impossible in the U.S. hardwood sector because of the complexity of the supply chain and variation in regulatory practice across the nation. Due to the naturally diverse composition of US hardwood forests and fragmentation of ownership across 9.4 million family forests, US hardwood exporters need to rely on extensive aggregation across numerous harvest locations to create viable export consignments. As a result a single shipment typically contains material that potentially derived from thousands or, in some cases even tens of thousands of individual properties.  

Even if such documentation could be gathered, the ability of an individual operator in the EU to verify this information or draw useful conclusions is greatly complicated by the diversity of forest regulations across the U.S. hardwood production area. There is no standard set of "documents" that could be requested as private forest owners in the U.S. do not typically need government permits to harvest timber. Harvesting regulations, permits, and specific rules might apply depending on the state or municipality, the size of the harvest, and other factors like environmental protections, but this is not standardised.

The U.S. is officially categorised for EUDR purposes by the EC as a low risk country and is acknowledged separately by the EC (in the August 2025 EU-US framework trade agreement) as being a negligible risk to global deforestation. Under the terms of EUDR, for regulated commodities from low risk countries, operators need fulfil the "Information Requirements" under Article 9, but do not need to fulfil the "Risk Assessment" obligations under Article 10, or the "Risk Mitigation" obligations under Article 11. 

Under Article 9, with respect to illegality risk, the requirement is that the operator must provide "adequately conclusive and verifiable information that the relevant commodities have been produced in accordance with the relevant legislation of the country of production, including any arrangement conferring the right to use the respective area for the purposes of the production of the relevant commodity".  There is no specific obligation in the EUDR legal text to demand permits or similar documents from every single harvest site from which the wood might potentially have derived when sourcing from a low risk country. AHA’s understanding is that the state risk assessment is "adequately conclusive and verifiable information" that the harvest was undertaken on land where harvesting is permitted and where there is a negligible risk of any form of illegal harvest. 

Furthermore, EUDR Guidance (Commission Notice C/2025/4524 of 12.8.2025 - Item 4) expands on the obligations on operators with respect to information gathering to confirm negligible risk in low risk countries, indicating that the objective is to "ascertain.... that all relevant commodities and products they place on the market or export have been produced exclusively in such countries or parts thereof that were classified as low risk in accordance with Article 29 (11)". They must apply the steps identified in Articles 10 and 11 only "if an operator sourcing from a low-risk country obtains or is made aware of any information that would point to a risk of non-compliance or circumvention" and furthermore that "it is generally sufficient that the information [confirming EUDR compliance] is independently verifiable and conclusive in itself". The Guidance also notes that the "data collection, risk analysis, and risk mitigation must be causally related, and must reflect the characteristics of the operator's business activities and of the supply chains." 

AHA maintains that the information in the AHA state risk assessments confirming negligible risk is indeed "independently verifiable and conclusive" and that provision of a state-wide risk assessment in the context of U.S. hardwoods does indeed "reflect the characteristics of the operator's business activities and of the supply chains". 

In line with EUDR, the EU operator must satisfy themselves that the AHA legality analysis is comprehensive and confirms negligible risk at the original point of harvest to their own satisfaction. With that aim in mind, operators are encouraged to familiarise themselves with the "Jurisdictional Risk Assessment Framework" which formed the basis of the assessment - and with both the full and summary report for the relevant state(s) - which can be accessed here. 

AHA is confident that the level of assurance of negligible illegality risk provided by independent and expert state risk assessment is at least as robust as that which might be provided by the gathering of any other documents, whether in the U.S. hardwood or any other global context.  

Does an AHA definition of negligible risk align with the EUDR definition?

The AHA Platform is designed to align with EUDR’s definition of negligible risk. Article 2 (26) of EUDR defines ‘negligible risk’ as that “level of risk that applies to relevant commodities and relevant products, where, on the basis of a full assessment of product-specific and general information, and, where necessary, of the application of the appropriate mitigation measures, those commodities or products show no cause for concern as being not in compliance with Article 3, point (a) or (b) [i.e. deforestation-free and legally produced]”. 

The obligations of EU operators with respect to deforestation-free and legality information is further elaborated under Article 9.1(g) and (h) of EUDR, where they are required “to provide adequately conclusive and verifiable information” that the products are deforestation-free and legally sourced. 

In short therefore, the standard set by EUDR is to demonstrate “negligible risk” that the wood is deforestation-free and legal based on “adequately conclusive and verifiable information”. It is explicitly not to prove zero-risk. 

This provides the legal foundation within the context of EUDR of AHA’s approach, which demonstrates negligible risk through a combination of expert independent risk assessment at state level for legality and county-level for deforestation and the application of mitigation measures where risks are identified. In practice the AHA state legality risk assessments have adjudged all to be negligible risk across all EUDR criteria, while the county deforestation assessments have adjudged only a handful to be potentially non-negligible risk.