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News and Information

EU Agrees New Target to Halt Biodiversity Loss

On Monday 15 March the EU agreed a new target to halt biodiversity loss across Europe. The EU Environment Council minutes state that the Council is “SERIOUSLY CONCERNED that both the EU and the global biodiversity 2010 targets have not been met, that biodiversity loss continues at an unacceptable rate entailing very serious ecological, economic and social consequences".

Furthermore, the EU Environment Council noted and recognised the significant wider costs of the continuing loss of biodiversity. According to the TEEB study (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity), the annual loss of ecosystem services under a business-as-usual scenario is estimated to be equivalent to around €50 billion, while by 2050 the accumulated welfare losses could be equivalent to 7% of annual consumption. The TEEB study also found  that up to 2.6% of those working in Europe have jobs mostly based on natural assets and that up to 16.6% of European jobs are indirectly linked to those natural assets.

The reasons for the failure of the EU to achieve the original target (to halt biodiversity loss by 2010) are attributed to incomplete implementation of certain legal instruments, incomplete and poor integration into sectoral policies, insufficient scientific knowledge and data gaps, insufficient funding, lack of additional efficiently targeted instruments to tackle specific problems (such as on invasive alien species (IAS), and shortcomings in communication and education to enhance awareness.

The greatest threats and pressures to biodiversity are identified as habitat destruction, fragmentation and degradation caused by detrimental land-use change, over-exploitation and unsustainable use of natural resources, invasive alien species, illegal trade in endangered species, ocean acidification, pollution, and increasingly, climate change.

The EU has called for action to be stepped up across all the member states and underlines that the protection of biodiversity and the maintenance of ecosystem services requires cost-efficient policies and actions and goes well beyond protected areas and ecological networks. In particular efforts must be stepped up  to integrate biodiversity into the development and implementation of other policies, in particular those national and EU policies related to natural resources management, such as agriculture, food security, forestry, fisheries, and energy, as well as spatial planning, transport, tourism, trade, and development. It recognises the importance of “Green Infrastructure”  to integrating biodiversity considerations into these other policies and highlights in particular the  contribution of “Green Infrastructure” to climate adaptation and mitigation objectives, to prevent habitat fragmentation, to increase connectivity and to maintain species evolution processes and accordingly calls on  the European Commission to further develop this concept.

The new European target seeks to halt the loss of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystem services in the EU by 2020, and restore them as much as is possible. The target also looks to increase the EU contribution to averting global biodiversity loss, and to build on the work achieved since the previous EU target was last agreed in 2001. The EU has set the target ahead of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) International Conference of the Parties, that will take place in Nagoya, Japan, in October.

The full details of the agreement on the new EU biodiversity target can be found at:
http://www.eu-un.europa.eu/articles/fr/article_9571_fr.htm .