This law is part of the European “Green Deal”. It requires Member States to repair damaged ecosystems, while biodiversity is threatened.
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This is the flagship text of the “Green Pact”, this package of ecological measures of the European Union. The European Parliament adopted the nature restoration law on Wednesday 12 July. A text aimed at requiring Member States to preserve land and marine areas damaged by human activities. The project aims to restore biodiversity, which includes all the animals, plants and bacteria present on earth, their ecosystems and the existing interactions between living beings and their environment. The need to preserve biodiversity was first recognized at the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992 in Rio, Brazil.
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Today, according to the latest report on the state of conservation of the European Commission, more than 80% of natural habitats are in a poor state of conservation. According to the Swiss NGO IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), 1,677 species of European animals and plants are threatened with extinction.
Among the species most at risk are trees and more specifically “endemic” species, which only grow in Europe, such as chestnut trees or mountain ash. Trees are seriously threatened by the overexploitation of forests, the development of cities or the introduction of invasive alien species. According to the IUCN, 58% of them are thus threatened with extinction.
70% of vertebrates have disappeared since 1970
The situation of freshwater fish and molluscs is also very worrying, with respectively 40% and 60% of them at risk of extinction. As for pollinating insects, one species of butterfly and one species of bee out of ten are threatened in Europe, in particular due to the presence of pesticides such as neonicotinoids.
According to the IUCN, 36 species have disappeared in Europe since 2015, like many freshwater fish and molluscs for example. The disappearance of certain species of animals and plants is not a new phenomenon, but the current rate seems worrying. Globally, nearly 70% of vertebrate species disappeared between 1970 and 2018; this is up to 1,000 times faster than the natural rate according to the WWF.