Acção Ambiental para o Barlavento
AA
A wide range of environmental advocacy and conservation issues mainly in Portugal and Costa Rica
ID: 109185936968-88
Lobbying Activity
Response to EU 2030 Biodiversity Strategy
17 Jan 2020
If the EU 2030 biodiversity strategy is to attain its worthy aims it must accept that drastic and wide-ranging steps are required. It will have to recognise that even if Natura 2000 is "the largest coordinated network of protected areas in the world" it offers scarcely more than a temporary and inadequate "haven to Europe's most valuable and threatened species".
Two major problems are size and isolation with attendant consequences on breadth and exchange of diversity. Thomas Lovejoy's edge effect findings of the 80s about the importance of size remain unheeded - many protected areas are unsustainably small. Equally troubling - the Natura Network is not a network. How many sites are linked by corridors, latitudinal or altitudinal, across the barrens that often surround them?
Compounding this, in numerous cases protection is merely de jure, not de facto. (Almost half of the Natura site considered of highest biodiversity priority in southern Portugal is eucalyptus plantation.)
Thus the Community's State of Nature report recognises that only 16% of the EU's most important natural habitats and 23% of its protected species are doing well. In terms of crude species survival, a collection of botanical gardens, zoos and the Svalbard seed vault might accomplish more. Otherwise we may be condemned to resorting to gene drives and CRISPR recreations. (For all their shortcomings, however, Europe's remaining natural areas are treasures that we must do everything to preserve.)
Another huge hurdle is modest popular support. Brussels' call for feedback has elicited no more than 69 responses from a community of over 500 million. Although the issue of biodiversity loss makes headlines in the serious press fairly regularly, perhaps it is unreasonable to expect input from a generally unaware or uncaring population whose concern is usually confined to little more than lip-service.
What about NGOs or politicians? In September Portugal was found guilty by the European Court of Justice of chronic disregard for the Habitats Directives. When informed of the Court's decision, only one national NGO and one small political party displayed perfunctory interest.
While such indifference, ignorance &/or hubris is declining, we have a very long way to go before society, increasingly urbanised and detached from nature, grasps that our well-being depends on our planet's. How much have attitudes changed since the IPBES conclusion that a million species are threatened with extinction?
If Portugal is an example, the future of what natural legacy remains will depend not on governments, NGOs or political parties but on competent EU civil servants motivated by principle and prudence, not popularity, who can impose fines on errant member states.
It will depend, also, on unprecedented funding both to fix what is broken and to promote manifold mitigating measures such as payments for environmental services, support for rewilding and soil restoration and possibly fiscal incentives for land donations. Rural flight can help here as can recognition that an industrial monoculture of trees is not a forest. We must also adopt more sustainable food production, including vertical farming, establish improved distribution and learn to be far less wasteful.
More controversially, revision and reallocation of the vast sums assigned to Europe's Common Agricultural Policy is called for. CAP's good environmental aspects notwithstanding, it has contributed to the grim state of biodiversity today.
Similarly, environmental education must play a far more influential role in convincing future generations why our unsustainable ways must change.
Initially, given public sentiment and an ailing economy, funds and commitment are likely to fall short of what is needed. So we should note that Europe's biodiversity and threatened species are principally in a few southern member states and priorities should be set accordingly.
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