France wants to set aside 10% of its territory to protect biodiversity

France will place 10% of the country under “strong protection” to halt the gradual destruction of plant and animal life, the country’s new biodiversity strategy for 2030 that Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne unveiled on Monday.

Awaited for two years now, the strategy proposes a number of measures to protect and restore natural land and marine areas.

“The collapse of living things is an existential threat to our societies. To stem it and reverse the trend, we are adopting a national biodiversity strategy for 2030. Our ambition is clear: to anchor the ecological transition in everyday life”, announced Borne.

The strategy builds on the Kunming-Montreal Agreement reached at COP15 Biodiversity in December and the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, which calls for the effective protection of 30% of land and oceans, restoration of 30% of degraded ecosystems and a 50% reduction in pesticide use.

“The collapse of biodiversity is so strong, so rapid and so widespread that a sixth extinction is looming (…) In short, the collapse of biodiversity is an existential threat to our societies. We must halt it quickly and reverse the trend,” added the prime minister.

According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystems (IPBES), one million species worldwide are threatened with extinction, while three in four terrestrial ecosystems are considered degraded. France ranks sixth in the world for the highest number of endangered species.

Of the 40 measures in the proposed French strategy, the government wants to increase the areas in France currently under “strong protection” from less than 5% today to 10% of the country by 2030.

Another key milestone for the marine environment under the proposal is the government’s aim to fully protect overseas marine areas and mainland glaciers by 2030, compared to today’s protection of only 60% of these areas.

Other measures include tackling land reclamation, plastic pollution and underwater noise, banning imports of products that contribute to overseas deforestation, halving light pollution and reducing the impact of pesticides.

Restoring nature is also at the heart of the strategy, as the European Union has just adopted a law on nature restoration, intending to restore 30% of degraded land and marine areas by 2030.

France plans to plant 50,000 kilometres of hedges and create 50,000 hectares of wetlands to achieve this. In total, 120,000 hectares of natural areas will be restored each year, halving the rate of destruction.

To implement these measures, the government promises an “unprecedented” budget of €1 billion in 2024, an increase of €250 million from the previous year. To “reinforce these actions”, the government also plans to create 141 jobs in government departments and increase the environmental policing powers of the 1,700 public inspectors.

Criticism from environmentalists

The strategy, presented in outline last July, has been criticised for being “partial and incomplete” with regard to ambition, particularly by the National Biodiversity Committee, which brings together 150 scientists, local authorities and NGOs.

The president of the French League for the Protection of Birds (LPO) also questioned Ecological Transition Minister Christophe Béchu about the “grey areas” surrounding the authorisation of “hunting, fishing, wind power and photovoltaic installations” in highly protected areas. “These areas must be protected,” he warned.

“It is impossible to please everyone,” Béchu said at the end of the talks, stressing that as France’s third strategy on the issue, it was the most “ambitious” in terms of human and budgetary resources.

“More than ever, we need to preserve nature and not put everything under a bell,” he insisted, criticising “those who always ask for more and those who always ask for less” – who, according to him, voted against the text on nature restoration in the European Parliament.

(Hugo Struna | Euractiv.fr)

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