After intense three-way negotiations between the Parliament, the Commission and the Council of the EU, the European institutions have reached an agreement on the law on Nature Restoration. The pact seeks to establish measures to restore at least 20% of the EU's terrestrial and marine areas by 2030, and all ecosystems that need to be rehabilitated by 2050. The agreement improves the text proposed by the European Parliament, as it opens the door that the measures are not limited only to the spaces of the Natura 2000 Network (which would limit their scope) and involve actions in agricultural spaces (enclaves that the European Parliament wanted to shield due to pressure from the agricultural industry and the right).
The restoration law (a mandatory regulation for countries) encountered rejection by the European People's Party and the extreme right during its development, which explains why in the end its content was less ambitious than initially planned by the Community Executive.
However, its philosophy maintains the promotion of the first regulation to recover degraded spaces to conserve biodiversity and mitigate warming.
The regulation covers a wide variety of terrestrial, coastal and freshwater ecosystems including wetlands, grasslands, forests, rivers and lakes, as well as marine ecosystems (such as seagrass beds and sponge and coral beds...)
States will implement measures to restore at least 30% of the different habitats that are in poor condition by 2030.
And they must prioritize Natura 2000 sites when implementing restoration measures.
Firstly, all member states must approve a national restoration plan and implement it.
During the negotiation (trilogues), it has been achieved that the restoration measures in terrestrial ecosystems are applied to all ecosystems, inside and outside the spaces of the Natura 2000 Network.
In this way, they will not be restricted only to these areas of European protection, as Parliament wanted, which would have greatly reduced the scope of the regulation and even generated inequalities between states.
The agreement says that they will act as a priority on the Natura Network and that it will be the States who decide.
Another important element is that agrarian ecosystems as well as peatlands are included in these restoration plans, something that Parliament had rejected; although the counterparts represent a weakening of the pact.
Thus, the effectiveness of the plans will not be measured based on the results obtained but rather only the effort made will be valued.
And to apply these plans, governments will be able to use only two of the three indicators that serve to measure the extent to which an agricultural ecosystem is degraded (pollinators, bird trends and stock or load of carbon stored in the soil).
However, this advance has had a high cost, such as the introduction of the possibility of establishing a pause in the application of the legislation; called “emergency regulatory brake.” That is, a country may invoke something like a "supervening major cause" to stop everything.
This is a nod to farmers; The agreed text allows the regulation's measures to be suspended for up to one year "for unexpected emergency reasons and it is not possible to meet some of these objectives within the expected time frame," explained Minister Teresa Ribera.
In addition, countries will have specific requirements to correct the decline in pollinators and the goal of restoring 30% of peatlands emptied for agricultural use by 2030; maintain dead wood in forests to improve the biodiversity of forest ecosystems and not reduce urban green spaces.
Additionally, it includes an obligation for member states to identify and remove artificial barriers to river connectivity, with the aim of converting at least 25,000 km into free-flowing rivers by 2030 and maintaining the natural connectivity of restored rivers.
A new article 10b is created that includes the obligation to plant, by 2030, 3 billion trees following ecological principles. And the requirement to avoid significant deterioration of areas subject to restoration that have reached a good state must be respected.
This agreement comes after some truly complex and controversial negotiations, in which the Council and the Commission have had to work hard to find common ground with Parliament's significantly weaker position.
The law was on the verge of going down last July in the European Parliament, where it was approved almost miraculously in a very close vote, carried out by the socialist, green, liberal and left-wing groups, after the strong rejection raised by the European People's Party, very belligerent against this regulation, understanding that it went against the interests of farmers.
A large part of the agricultural sector has opposed this law from the beginning, especially the Copa-Cogeca union and large intensive agriculture lobbies, convinced that the regulation attacks the interests of agriculture.
The large agro-industrial industry considers that the inclusion of agrarian ecosystems in the law would imply restrictions and the obligation to restore degraded spaces. These sectors have been rejecting this idea with very belligerent campaigns, accompanied by hoaxes. “Good biodiversity conservation is essential to guarantee food security. Without biodiversity there will be no food security,” says Vanessa Sánchez, Global Nature technician. "This message is supported by more than 6,000 European scientists."
As a result of these pressures, numerous objectives were watered down when Parliament's position was adopted, and many concessions had to be made to satisfy all parties.
However, the agreement reached in the trilogues must now be endorsed by the Member States, as well as undergo a crucial vote by the Environment committee of the EU Parliament later this year, where conservative groups can return to stand against.
If the proposal successfully passes these steps, it will be put to a final vote in the plenary session of Parliament.
With all this, the EU must fulfill its international commitments, in particular the UN Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity framework agreed at the CBD COP15 in 2022.
Environmental organizations have asked all Spanish political parties for broad support in the European Parliament. Spain is one of the countries in Europe most vulnerable to climate change and desertification, so restoring our nature is essential.
Once the regulation is approved, Spain must approve a state restoration plan, which is already included in its natural heritage and biodiversity plan, for which the organizations request that it have broad public participation and the maximum possible ambition.
Friends of the Earth, Ecologists in Action, Greenpeace, SEO/BirdLife and WWF positively value the agreement on the final text for the regulation, "which will allow progress in an obligation that the Member States have already had since 1992."
However, these organizations warn that the regulation "continues to be very far from what science indicates is necessary to confront the climate and biodiversity emergency, so it runs the risk of being insufficient in practice and allowing inaction." of some Member States".
