EU envoys to discuss lowering protection status of wolves amid NGOs’ concerns

6 months ago 51

EU ambassadors will debate lowering the protection status of wolves on Wednesday (15 May), a controversial move that has no scientific justification, according to conservationists, who denounced it in an open letter.

The point is foreseen in the agenda of the meeting of EU ambassadors on 15 May, but no decision is expected. “This will be a guidance debate only, to see how work could continue,” an EU diplomat told Euractiv.

According to other EU sources, some states are calling for further data on the current situation of the species before continuing the work in the Council, while others want to go ahead in bringing together national experts on agriculture and the environment.

The Commission proposed in December 2023 lowering the wolf’s protection status under the Bern international convention on wildlife conservation. The bloc’s executive proposed to bring down the status of wolves from ‘strictly protected’ to ‘protected species’, implying larger opportunities for hunting wolves in the EU.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen explained at the time that the move was motivated by the concentration of wolf packs in some European regions, which is “a real danger, especially for livestock”.

Ten NGOs wrote in an open letter dated 8 May that the decision “is clearly a politically motivated U-turn”. “We are very concerned,” the letter said, “that the discussion on this issue has so far been largely dominated and driven by farming and hunting interests”.

The EU “rejected similar proposals in 2006, 2018, and 2022 given that there was no justifiable scientific basis to alter” the wolf’s protection status, the letter added. “There is still no scientific basis for it now,” the NGOs wrote.

In September 2023, the European Parliament split in a debate on the topic.

The EPP coordinator for agriculture, Herbert Dorfmann, led the charge to push the downgrading of the wolf’s protection, followed by all of the Parliament’s right wing camp. Having a “strictly protected wolf and a defenseless sheep”, he said, “is an unfair balance”.

Anja Hazenkamp, an MEP from the Left, replied that “again, shooting is the first reaction of some” to the problems caused by the coexistence between large predators and rural communities. She called for “strict protection of the wolf […] not to make the same mistake as we have done in recent centuries”, when the species was at risk.

The wolf is one of the six large carnivore species in Europe, alongside the brown bear, Eurasian lynx, the Iberian lynx, wolverine, and golden jackal.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]