Forests are crucial in providing climate change mitigation and adaptation services, hence the European strategy must base its foundations on missions such as preserve and promote biodiversity, enhance forest cover through afforestation and reforestation. To start the way forward, the competences on forest related policies should be addressed correctly, data on innovative methods of protecting and building forest resilience have to be gathered regularly and we need to promote a circular use of wood. Forest management is only sustainable when it takes on broad multiple elements, as it is the case in this report. The forest-based sector and the bio-economy sector employ at least 500,000 European citizens directly and 2.6 million indirectly. The new EU Forest Strategy should act as an effective coordination instrument between the EU forest-related policies, taking into account the whole forest-based value chain.