Where the regulation stands
The EU Deforestation Regulation applies from 30 December 2026 for medium and large operators and traders, and from 30 June 2027 for micro and small operators. The Commission's simplification review of 4 May 2026 confirmed the legal text will not be reopened, so those dates are the ones to plan against.
Under the December 2025 revision, only primary operators — those placing a product on the EU market for the first time — submit a Due Diligence Statement. Downstream operators and traders instead collect and pass on DDS reference numbers and keep records on their direct business partners.
What compliance requires in practice
- Plot-level geolocation for the land where each commodity was produced
- Risk assessment against deforestation and against the legality of production in that jurisdiction
- Mitigation where risk is more than negligible, with the actions recorded
- A DDS filed to the EU Information System before goods are placed on the market, for primary operators
- Documentation retained for five years
Where teams lose time
The slowest part is rarely the reporting. It is getting usable plot data out of suppliers who have never submitted a polygon before. Over 75% of the supplier GeoJSON files we see arrive with problems, and roughly 15% carry errors the EU Information System rejects outright — duplicate nodes, self-intersections, wrong winding direction, excessive coordinate precision, unclosed polygons.
Those are all fixable in bulk once the files are in hand, which is why collection and validation are worth starting well before the reporting layer. SystemEarth handles both ends: a supplier portal that gives submitters validation feedback directly, and a DDS builder that compiles validated data into submission-ready statements.
