Environmental Law Lecture series
Welcome to the Environmental Law Lecture series! In this series, environmental law scholars will provide important insights into how EU environmental law helps to achieve a high level of environmental protection in the European Union and beyond.
Make Europe wild again:
International commitments and European obligations on nature conservation and restoration
Recent commitments at the global and European level have been taken to reverse the biodiversity crisis and to help address the climate crisis. At the international level, the Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted in 2022 under the Biodiversity Convention. It puts forward 23 targets for 2030, aimed at reducing threats to biodiversity and aiming for sustainable use of biodiversity, while also providing tools for implementation. At the EU level, a Biodiversity Strategy was adopted in 2020, as part of the EU Green Deal. Following up on the commitments in the Strategy, the European Commission proposed a Nature Restoration Law in June 2022. After a bumpy legislative process, the proposal was finally adopted in June 2024, be it severely weakened. Nevertheless, it remains a groundbreaking law which holds the possibility to tackle both the biodiversity and climate crisis by substantially upscaling nature restoration within the EU through the development of national restoration plans. This lecture will address the Nature Restoration law in light of the EU’s international commitments.
Watch it here on Youtube if you'd like to access the video transcript or jump chapters.
Key themes
- Urgency of ecosystem restoration: The lecture emphasizes the critical need for large-scale restoration to address biodiversity loss, climate change, and ecosystem degradation, pointing to the EU’s Nature Restoration Law as a key step.
- EU Nature Restoration Law: The law sets binding targets to restore 20% of land and sea by 2030, focusing on various ecosystems, including urban and agricultural areas, and is seen as crucial for both biodiversity and climate mitigation.
- Challenges to implementation: The lecture explores political resistance, legal hurdles, and the need for clear definitions, funding, and public participation in successfully implementing the law across EU member states.
- Global biodiversity efforts: The law is positioned within broader international frameworks, such as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and is seen as a potential model for global biodiversity and restoration efforts.
- Political resistance and public concerns: Significant opposition from farming groups and political factions raised concerns about economic impacts, but the law passed after political compromises and continued public support for restoration.
Speaker
An Cliquet
An Cliquet is a professor of international environmental and biodiversity law at Ghent University. Her research covers international and EU biodiversity law, with a focus on ecological restoration law, and topics such as climate change and biodiversity and protected areas law. She teaches several courses on international and European environmental and biodiversity law.
Lecture Series
This lecture is part of a series that runs from 2023 to 2024, providing students and scholars with core insights into the current state of EU environmental law and how it can be improved to achieve greater environmental protection. All lectures will be recorded and made accessible through YouTube, and the series is freely accessible to all.
If you'd like to know more about the other upcoming lectures:
This GreenDeal-Net lecture serie is hosted by MCEL, METRO and organised in cooperation with GLaw-Net and GreenDeal-NET. Maastricht University students will be eligible for certificates of attendance (see more information under the registration link).