Carmelo Marcén Albero 
Eco-social researcher and collaborator of Fundación Alternativas
All Europeans should be pleased that the EU has turned its attention back to nature: it wants to revitalise it. So many centuries of economic and speculative inattention have turned the natural landscape into a caricature of what it should once have been. Of course, we know that the stay of societies causes deterioration in the land that hosts them, in the places we used to call biodiversity paradises.
The truth is that they have changed a lot, generally for the worse. But that does not mean we should be satisfied: let bygones be bygones and better times will come, say those people who only think of themselves. We should tell these environmental egoists that, according to the WWF, 75% of the land in Spain is in danger of desertification. To which we would add that it would be more convenient to get involved in recovering what we can of what has been damaged, if only because we are nature and we must educate ourselves in this. This is what Jaques Delors and his team recommended in Learning: The Treasure Within (1996).
The entry into force of the Law on Nature Restoration (LRN) on 18 August should have been front page news in all media, I dare say for several days in a row. It is an important milestone – something like a revolution towards vital essences – which we should be happy about, as well as watchful of its development. Therefore, we believe that the first thing to do is to communicate to all the inhabitants of the Union that the careless destruction of the life scene is over. However, that date was not the right one to call for ecological respect; many people were in natural places, perhaps taking away some of their biodiversity, or at least polluting them a little more. Then we will have to remember with subsequent events that the LRN exists, that conserving is not the same as preserving or restoring the natural environment.
The road to formulating such a law, and then implementing it, has been far from easy. When the European Green Deal was unveiled – formally presented in December 2019 – it was publicised that the EU intended to make its coexistence ecosystem climate-neutral: Ursula Von der Leyen’s first mandate proposed as one of its main priorities to ‘build a climate-neutral, green, fair and social Europe’. At the time, voices of scepticism were heard; no doubt due to the EU countries’ customary delay in recognising the obvious and in achieving certain objectives, including the formal and non-formal education proposed by UNESCO in the Delors Report. Those demands were not gratuitous, but the illusions of previous agreements faded with time. Political will has for too long remained skewed towards economic arguments and the supposed global happiness they bring. Unfortunately, the serious adoption of the European Green Pact – an intelligent and risky gamble – has left many people indifferent, both at the individual level and at the level of administrative or business entities.
In addition, the emergence of extreme right-wing political forces and the European People’s Party, unfriendly even to the word ‘environment’, led to fears that the Parliament that emerged from the June elections in the EU was going to be a drag on any decision to protect nature. Its articles faced obstacles both in the European Parliament, due to the opposition of the European People’s Party, and in the Council. During this time, alarming articles referring to the Green Pact appeared in the media: Goodbye to the Green Pact; It will not be approved in time before the elections; Agricultural disputes will derail the new CAP; Many words that hide few eco-social ambitions; The Green Pact saves the furniture, etc. Such scepticism was countered by other initiatives. Even the European Environment Agency (EEB) had to come out in defence of the European Pact for the Future because it ‘fosters hope and courage, creates well-being for all, catalyses competitiveness through sustainability and drives the transformational systemic change needed for a sustainable future’. It also included a warning: ‘The choices we make today will determine the course of history’. In the end it went through, narrowly, due to partial withdrawals of vetoes by Austria and Hungary. Then there is a pressing need to achieve and consolidate significant progress in areas identified in the Pact such as:
- Achieve climate neutrality or net zero emissions balance by 2050.
- Strengthen the performance of a Social Climate Fund to support the sectors most vulnerable to the effects of the new ETS
- Achieve real decarbonisation of the energy system
- Elevate the protection and restoration of biodiversity as an essential component of the Biodiversity Strategy 2030
- Promote more sustainable food production, consumption and healthy diets
- Mobilise at least EUR 1 trillion in sustainable investments over the next decade
- Reinforce the implementation of the European Green Deal Investment Plan through the so-called Just Transition Facility.
For all these reasons, it is of the utmost importance that all citizens, from the highest level of government to the lowest level of the companies that supply us, share the desire for a transversal renewal and assume the necessary transitions with a new climate narrative. But let us alert the European and national institutions. One part of society, the environmental NGOs, will be very attentive to the decision-making process in each state with respect to the main desires of the LRN roadmap, which, we fear, will be subject to the ups and downs and interests of some states or political groups.
In short: difficult yes, possible too, but above all it needs commitment to a just transition in the EU (from conservation and nature protection to restoration). We will have to know how to communicate this, to get widespread support, to convince the resistors. There will be difficulties, but it must remain a survival guide that restores natural and social coexistence in the EU; that brings us as close as possible to a nature of times past, so that it is our companion, not our supposedly inexhaustible pantry. Let us end by echoing the words of Susana Muhamad, who will chair Cop16 in Cali in October: ‘Focusing exclusively on reducing carbon emissions without restoring and protecting natural ecosystems would be dangerous for humanity and would risk social collapse’.
