Europe was leading a push to save nature from total collapse. Then came two wars and the energy shocks.

Por Marianne Gros — Sustainability – POLITICO

Europe was leading a push to save nature from total collapse. Then came two wars and the energy shocks.

Four years after it helped craft a historic global deal to save biodiversity, the EU is struggling to stay the course.

By MARIANNE GROS
in Brussels

Europe’s economic and security troubles have turned its once bellowing call to save global biodiversity into a whisper.

In 2022, the European Union emerged from a pivotal world nature summit in Montreal with the glow of a victor fresh from battle. It had successfully fought for a U.N. agreement to protect 30% of the Earth’s land and seas by 2030 and steer hundreds of billions of dollars to halt biodiversity loss.  

Four years later — as European leaders head to another U.N. nature summit, this time in Yerevan, Armenia — its environmental leadership is on shaky ground.

Tense trade relations with the Trump administration and China, two wars on the EU’s doorstep, soaring energy prices and a preoccupation with slashing bureaucracy now command Brussels’ attention.

That’s sent much of the bloc’s green agenda shooting down its list of concerns, which are under fire from conservatives and far-right political groups for putting up too many barriers to economic growth. That includes the Nature Restoration Law — the central pillar in the Commission’s plan to reach the goals of the U.N. biodiversity agreement.

“Nature restoration remains a priority, but the ideological version Brussels signed up to in Kunming-Montreal in 2022 and in the controversial nature restoration regulation clearly will not,” said Sander Smit, a Dutch lawmaker from the right-wing European Conservative & Reformists group of the European Parliament. 

Once a driving force behind the 2022 nature deal, a distracted EU now risks slowing global momentum on protecting nature and paying for it — especially if, as NGOs warn, it fails to deliver at home. The political tension has made it harder for Brussels to prioritize environmental issues, even as the EU’s rivers, lakes, wetlands, reefs and forests remain in a dire state.  

As the fastest warming continent on the planet, Europe is under pressure to accelerate its efforts to halt nature loss by 2050 to mitigate the effects of climate change and ensure food security. Natural ecosystems are essential to store planet-warming carbon emissions, and research shows that global agricultural systems largely depend on them. 

“Nature is being framed as a problem, not as a solution,” said Sabien Leemans, a senior biodiversity policy expert at WWF — even if “farmers and foresters are the first victims of our changing climate.”

As EU officials head to the 17 th U.N. summit (COP17) on biodiversity in Yerevan, Armenia for the next two weeks, that internal tension will be hard to ignore — but so will the urgent need to halt nature loss, particularly after a summer of intense wildfires and drought across the European continent.

The extreme weather events have brought “the issue of nature restoration and ambition when it comes to biodiversity back to the fore,” Christopher O’Sullivan, Ireland’s state minister for nature who will be representing EU countries at the COP, told POLITICO.

A bad report card 

The Kunming-Montreal framework promised to restore 30% of degraded habitats by the end of the decade and to halt the extinction of threatened species by 2050. It was widely hailed as a turning point for environmental multilateralism.  

“It was a special moment to have that global agreement that is like the nature equivalent to the Paris Agreement,” said Frank Wugt Larsen, a biodiversity expert at the European Environment Agency, describing the deal as a “major milestone for biodiversity.” 

Four years later, countries — including the EU — are still dragging their feet over the commitments they made in Montreal, endangering their 2030 goals. The targets will not be met on time unless “collective implementation accelerates rapidly,” states the U.N.’s global assessment of progress. 

A landmark fund to channel corporate profits into nature conservation in developing countries launched at the last summit has so far been a stunning flop, failing to raise almost any money at all. 

A review of this sluggish progress will be the “centerpiece” of this year’s COP, according to Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity. Leaders will “[take] stock of implementation” and try to “identify why it’s been going slow,” she told POLITICO in an interview in September.

Schomaker wants to see countries reaffirm the commitments made in 2022. “That sounds easy but if you look a bit at the shifting geopolitics, that in itself I think [would be] an important message,” she said. 

Shifting geopolitics

These global talks aim to get 196 countries on the same course of action to fight environmental collapse and biodiversity loss. But they are not immune to the geopolitical shifts and crises that dictate governments’ financial and political decisions.

In Europe, a drive to reduce dependence on foreign powers amid ongoing wars and continued energy shocks has given fresh political weight to demands for cheaper energy, faster permitting and domestic production, increasing pressure on environmental safeguards.

Four years ago, when the U.N. biodiversity deal was struck, the European Green Deal was still considered a cornerstone of the Commission president’s political mandate. Since then, Europe’s balance of power has shifted.  

The 2024 European elections saw right-of-center political parties tighten their grip on power in Brussels. The European People’s Party — von der Leyen’s own political family and the largest political group in town — now increasingly looks to right-wing and far-right groups to pass legislation, rather than relying on its traditional centrist allies.

That political upheaval, coupled with a wave of farmer protests, energy crises and industry complaints over burdensome regulation, has pushed von der Leyen to change course and prioritize competitiveness above all else in her second mandate. 

“Food security, housing, industry and rural livelihoods have rightly moved back up the agenda,” said Smit, the right-wing Dutch lawmaker, adding that the EU should now revise its nature rules “so that housing, industry, energy and family farms are weighed alongside biodiversity.” 

Echoing one of the recommendations in a landmark competitiveness roadmap by former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, Brussels’ eurocrats have spent the better part of two years tearing up the EU rulebook under the banner of “simplification.”

Environmental laws on pollution and emissions reporting were the first target of the purge. Now, a growing number of EU governments and businesses want to weaken the bloc’s core nature and water protection laws to make it easier to launch industrial projects like mines, data centers and electricity networks.  

As he heads into the COP talks, Ireland’s O’Sullivan insists EU countries are still committed to high nature protection standards — even if they want more flexibility in how the rules work in practice.

“We have strong laws, laws that we always have to be able to adapt,” he said. On the global stage, Europe can still use its access to scientific expertise “to restore nature and protect species globally.”

But on reaching nature targets, “we’re not anywhere near where we need to be,” he admitted.

“There’s no point in us going into a global debate or global discussion being the preacher in the room and saying how things should be done. We need to look at ourselves now.”

Show me the money

Critics argue that EU leaders are focusing too much on the immediate financial burden of nature protection, ignoring the profound economic impact of biodiversity loss in the future.

In Europe alone, over 80% of habitats, 39% of bird species and 62% of other protected species are in poor or bad condition, according to EEA data. 

That poses significant risks to the bloc’s economy. A 2024 European Central Bank paper found that 72% of non-financial corporations in the euro area “are critically dependent” on nature and “would experience significant economic problems as a result of ecosystem degradation.”  

But as EU leaders rush to finalize a deal on the size and structure of the bloc’s next trillion-euro cash pot, critics say the bloc’s suggested budget lacks any kind of dedicated funding for nature.  

“We were very concerned with the Commission’s budget proposal,” said the WWF’s Leemans. “We know from experience that nature is not prioritized when it’s in a big envelope about climate and the environment.”

That’s part of a broader pattern. While the question of who should foot the bill for protecting nature is high on the COP agenda, governments the world over are keeping a tight hold on their purse strings amid geopolitical turmoil and energy crises.

An additional $700 billion is needed annually to meet the objectives of the global biodiversity framework — yet spending that harms nature continues to vastly outweigh investment in protecting it by $30 to $1, according to a U.N. Environment Programme report published this year.

The EU needs to step up, according to Heather Grabbe, a senior fellow at the European think tank Bruegel. The bloc is focusing much more “on the short-term costs of taking action [on environmental issues] over the long-term costs of not taking action,” she said. But “the degradation of nature is going to cause competitiveness problems.”

“The evidence [of biodiversity’s economic importance] is quite strong,” said the EEA’s Larsen, who is also attending COP17 as part of the EU delegation.

“We are losing biodiversity, and human society depends on biodiversity for health, for economy, for everything.”

Fonte: Sustainability – POLITICO