UN environment chief slams EU nature law
opponents
Farming and biodiversity efforts need not be at odds,
Inger Andersen says.
Agriculture Dominates Debate Over EU Funding
BY ZIA
WEISE
JUNE 20,
2023 2:50 PM CET
BRUSSELS —
The EU’s flagship biodiversity law must pass, the United Nations’ top
environment official warned, condemning what she called “misinformation” spread
about the legislation by some political parties.
A growing
backlash is jeopardizing the bloc’s Nature Restoration Law, which aims to
return the Continent’s degraded natural areas to a healthy state.
EU
environment ministers narrowly agreed on a common position on the law on
Tuesday. The bill is now heading for a decisive vote in the European
Parliament’s environment committee on June 27 after conservative groups failed
in their push to kill the legislation in a first round of voting last week.
“If it were
to fail, it would be a failure for the European people, for the nations of
Europe and for the next European generations,” Inger Andersen, executive
director of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), told POLITICO during a visit
to Brussels on Tuesday.
“It is
absolutely critical that we understand that this is not a left-or-right issue …
it is about something much larger than that,” she said.
The Nature
Restoration Law is a key element of the EU’s Green Deal, seeking to halt
biodiversity loss and make ecosystems more resilient — which in turn should
help the bloc achieve its climate targets, as they partially rely on storing
CO2 in natural carbon sinks.
It also
seeks to enshrine in law the commitments the EU made at last year’s COP15
biodiversity talks to restore 30 percent of the world’s degraded nature by
2030.
“The EU and
EU countries were at the forefront” at COP15, Andersen said. “Seeing that now
being questioned, in the context of the Nature Restoration Law, is frankly
quite unhelpful.”
The
conservative European People’s Party (EPP) has led the backlash against the
law, arguing that it places too high a burden on European farmers and could
even lead to “global famine.”
While
declining to name any particular political groups, Andersen said that “some of
this information — which is clearly misinformation — is very unhelpful, and
frankly, very unfair.”
She added:
“It saddens me to see that political parties that have always stood for
sustainability, for farming, for productivity of the land, for integrity of our
natural resources, could see that this [law] would somehow be problematic.”
The EPP,
which declined to comment on Andersen's remarks, has also been criticized by
the wind industry for claiming that the nature bill would endanger the EU’s
renewable energy targets.
Turning
nature restoration into some type of culture war between left and right is “an
absurd notion,” Andersen continued. “Nature is about life … I think every child
understands that. And, frankly, I think voters get that.”
She also
rejected the “false narrative” that farming and biodiversity protection are at
odds with each other.
The EPP and
its allies have argued that, given rising costs and the war in Ukraine,
imposing any restrictions on agriculture would jeopardize food security and
farms’ survival.
Andersen, a
Danish economist who said she comes from a farming family, said it was the job
of policymakers to “allay fears” — and design “smart agricultural policies” to
enable farmers to make a living using sustainable methods.
The EPP, as
well as politicians like Belgium’s Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, have also
called for pausing regulatory efforts on biodiversity and nature protection
more broadly as industry faces a global economic slowdown.
The UNEP
boss believes that’s unwise.
“Nature
doesn’t wait,” Andersen said. “It's not going to sit and wait while we deal
with this other crisis. The world has to learn to walk and chew gum at the same
time … and that calls for leadership.”
Louise Guillot contributed reporting.
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