This is an extract from the June edition of Temperature Check, The Journal’s monthly climate newsletter. Sign up to receive Temperature Check to your email inbox for free in the box at the end of this article.
When you’re out and about, you may or may not be the type of person to ponder the health of the land underfoot. Here’s a quick snapshot: about 60 to 70% of soil in the EU is considered to be unhealthy, while a staggering 81% of assessed European habitats are in poor condition.
Someone should do something about that, you say? Well, there’s a row erupting in the EU over the last few weeks, and spilling over into Irish politics, about exactly that question.
A proposed Nature Restoration Law would set targets for the first time across the bloc aimed at bringing degraded land back to life for the sake of the environment and climate.
The idea was put forward by the European Commission last June and handed over to European Parliament committees to hammer out a position on before a version of the proposal is put before all 705 MEPs to vote on in a plenary session in the summer.
Any piece of EU legislation always demands a bit of give and take between the three EU institutions (the Commission, the Parliament and the Council) and among the political groupings of MEPs to take it from paper to practice, but this one has proven to be particularly contentious.
The law would set out a range of measures that should be undertaken to restore land, including rewetting areas of drained peatlands, increasing green spaces in urban areas, and improving biodiversity in lands used for agriculture and forestry.
Two committees of MEPs rejected the proposed law outright and the European People’s Party, the largest political grouping in the Parliament (and the Commission) and the group that Fine Gael MEPs sit in, pulled out of negotiations in the important Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) committee.
Supporters of the law say that it is a crucial piece of legislation to get the ball rolling much faster on protecting and restoring the natural world that has suffered under human influence to allow plants, animals, birds and insects to survive and thrive, carbon to be stored in the land instead of being released into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas, and to allow humans to continue to benefit from the land in areas like food production and water quality.
Opponents’ main concerns are with the capacity of member states to actually carry out the measures proposed, the amount of land that would need to be restored, and to what extent that could mean land currently used for agriculture would need to be repurposed, either for different types of farming that may yield less income or for something else altogether.
Will one side win the other over or will the proposal fall through without agreement? Or will a compromise be found somewhere in the middle – and could any compromise be enough to restore Europe’s degraded land?
If you’re trying to make heads or tails of it all, here’s a quick look at how the current situation has come to be.
The EU Commission proposed the Nature Restoration Law in June 2022 with a stated aim to cover at least 20% of the EU’s land and sea areas by 2030 with nature restoration measures and to extend those to include all ecosystems in need of restoration by 2050.
It said the law would set restoration targets and obligations across a range of ecosystems, including:
Member states would be required to develop national restoration plans in cooperation with scientists, stakeholders and the public to work towards the targets. The Commission said that analysis found every €1 spent on nature restoration would return between €8 and €38 worth of economic value in areas like food security, human health, and climate mitigation.
The next step was for the Parliament and the EU Council, the latter of which is made up of leaders from member states, to determine their positions on the proposal.
Last year, the Council presidency developed a “compromise text” seeking changes to the Commission’s proposed legislation. That document has not yet been made publicly available, but we know that the Council has taken a more conservative approach than the Commission’s original proposal.
A separate Council document outlines that in discussions with representatives from member states, they “stressed that flexibility will be necessary in order for them to be able to reflect specific national characteristics”.
“It was pointed out that the implementation will require substantial human as well as financial resources that are currently not available or would have to be substantially adjusted,” the document says.
In contrast, a draft report prepared by the rapporteur for the legislation in the ENVI committee of MEPs called for the law to go even further than the Commission’s proposal.
The report suggested an increase in the 2030 target from 20% to 30% to “align the overarching objective to 2030 with the European Parliament position as set out in the report on the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030″, but even finding agreement among MEPs on the more modest target is an ongoing struggle.
The acrimony in Europe has been reflected at home with weeks of commentary on both sides. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar of Fine Gael said there are aspects of the law that are “going too far and not fully recognising how we use land in Ireland in particular”. Junior minister Ossian Smyth of the Greens said he is “disappointed” with the EPP: “Forget the coalition and politics, I think Irish people love nature and want to protect it.”
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