The Eurasian otter or European river otter, found in the waterways and coasts of Europe, parts of Asia and parts of Northern Africa. It is listed as endangered in Ireland. Image: © Mark Hunter/Stock.adobe.com
Having lost vital support at the eleventh hour, the hard-fought EU law to protect biodiversity is now stuck in limbo.
The EU’s “landmark” Nature Restoration Law was meant to be a done deal. Having been proposed in June 2022, it has gone through several rounds of negotiations and passed a vote in the European Parliament in February. The much debated and eventually watered-down law only needed the seal of approval from ministers at a meeting of the European Council.
However, late last month, Hungary withdrew their support of the law, following Sweden, the Netherlands and Italy, while Belgium, Austria, Finland and Poland all planned to abstain. This means the law doesn’t have the qualified majority needed to pass. A law needs support from representatives of 65pc of the EU population to pass, but the Nature Restoration Law now only has 64.05pc. As a result, the vote to adopt the law, which is usually a formality after a Parliament vote, was removed from the Environment Council’s agenda for its meeting on 25 March and postponed indefinitely.
A biodiversity crisis
There is an urgent need for legislation to protect biodiversity. We are currently seeing the fastest rate of species extinction since the age of the dinosaurs, with as many as 2m species now threatened with extinction. And 81pc of the EU’s habitats found to be in poor status.
In response to this biodiversity crisis, a major agreement was signed by 188 countries and regions at the United Nations COP15 Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, Canada in December 2022. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework aims to address biodiversity loss, restore ecosystems and protect indigenous rights, with a plan to protect 30pc of the Earth’s land, coastal areas and oceans, and reduce to near zero the loss of areas of high biodiversity importance by 2030.
EU leaders were praised for spearheading the Kunming-Montreal agreement. Now, the EU’s Nature Restoration Law aims to restore at least 20pc of the EU’s land and sea areas by 2030 and all ecosystems in need of restoration by 2050. To achieve this, member states need to restore 30pc of degraded habitats covered by the new law, which includes forests, rivers and wetlands. This increases to 60pc by 2040 and 90pc by 2050.
There was some backlash to earlier drafts of the law, with certain provisions weakened as a result. For example, the target for rewetting peatlands was set to 30pc of drained peatlands under agricultural use by 2030 and 50pc by 2050, with the option for member states who would be most affected to apply lower targets. The compromised text also includes the option of an emergency brake, whereby the provisions of the law could be suspended for agricultural ecosystems for exceptional events outside of the EU’s control and which may have consequences for food security.
The EU’s failure to pass the Nature Restoration Law now puts the UN's Global Biodiversity Framework in peril.
We call on the @EU_Commission & @EUCouncil to take decisive action to deliver the Nature Restoration Law #RestoreNature pic.twitter.com/cYJXJBpFsh
— Environmental Pillar (@Env_Pillar) April 4, 2024
Speaking after the Council meeting on 25 March, European commissioner for the environment, oceans and fisheries Virginijus Sinkevičius said he deeply regrets that the law did not make it to a vote that day.
“This file has been subject to wide-ranging discussions, but we have managed to bridge diverging views and find common ground with the provisional agreement reached in trilogues and a lot of work has been done behind that and I’m truly thankful to all who engaged, who found the courage to bridge the different positions,” he said.
“What we brought to the final step of approval in the Council is a very balanced deal, a deal which will ensure that we will achieve the key objectives of the law while giving the flexibilities that member states have asked for to enable a stepwise implementation.”
After that meeting, Sinkevičius said he remained optimistic that the EU would “finally seal the deal on this key file and move to implementations”.
“Without the Nature Restoration Law, we would be missing a crucial tool to meet the binding targets in the EU Climate Law and we would discard an indispensable instrument that can help us become more resilient towards the devastating effects of climate change.”
Ireland’s Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Eamon Ryan, TD, expressed similar sentiments after the Council meeting of 25 March. He said it would be “shocking” if the EU didn’t manage to adopt the law.
“For our own people, for our own farming communities, our own forestry system, our own people who want to see nature restored, how could we give that up? How could we say ‘oh, we’ve decided not to restore nature? We’re going to destroy nature; we’re going to let nature go’ – that would be a horrific outcome.”
EU reputation at stake
Ryan was hopeful that in the coming weeks a consensus could be reached with dissenting countries to get the law over the line.
“We’ve gone through a very long legislative process where we’ve reached agreement with Parliament and the Commission. If you don’t honour your agreements as a council, who’d agree with you in the future again?” he said.
“This is important not just for the issue of biodiversity and restoring nature, but also more widely for the European process,” Ryan said.
Sinkevičius echoed these remarks, saying the current deadlock “raises serious questions and concerns as to the consistency and stability of the EU decision-making process”.
Since January of this year, Belgium has held the European Council presidency. This presents a particular challenge for the Nature Restoration Law because Belgium intended to abstain from the Council vote.
In an interview with De Zondag on 31 March, Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo described the Nature Restoration Law as “a bad law”.
“I am not against a law that protects our nature, on the contrary. I am against bad legislation,” he said. “This needs to go back to the drawing board.”
On 25 March, Ryan was adamant that re-opening negotiations was not an option because it was difficult enough to get agreement in the European Parliament in the first place and because there is not enough time to do so before the European elections in June.
“It does have to be done at government level,” Ryan said. “It has to be the presidency leading, and we have to hope for their sake, because I think if we don’t get it over the line, I think it would be a real shadow on the Belgian presidency. It would be remembered as a presidency which failed to protect nature.”
What’s next?
The Irish Wildlife Trust described the postponement of the law vote as “a very disappointing turn of events” and urged people to “continue to make noise about this and not allow it to die a silent death by political games and backroom politics”.
Ecologist Pádraic Fogarty, writing in The Journal last week, thinks it’s unlikely the law will be saved from its current “zombie status”. He argued that the upcoming European elections have given politicians a singular focus, that is, to be re-elected.
“Elections for the European Parliament in June are widely expected to deliver a win for the right and far right, effectively leading to a contest to see who can be seen to be resisting the ‘green agenda’ most, something that has been lumped in with the ‘woke ideology’,” he said.
“Against this background, and should this swing to the right materialise, the Nature Restoration Law is surely doomed.”
Some farming organisations have expressed relief that the law has been withdrawn, with the Irish Farmers’ Association saying they think the law should be reassessed after the European elections.
Speaking in response to the question of farmers’ concerns about the law, Ryan said people will blame the EU Green Deal as the problem and say that “nature restoration is killing farming”.
“It’s the exact opposite,” he argued. “We want to actually raise revenues to be able to get a whole new generation of young people into farming, forestry, protecting nature, and that’s at risk here if we don’t honour our own agreement, something we already agreed on and then abandoned at the last minute, that would be a shocking outcome.”
In the nearly two weeks since the vote was postponed, there has been no update on its progress. Speaking to The Irish Times earlier this week, Ryan said the fight isn’t over to pass the law but “it’s not looking good”.
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