Riga: With ten weeks to go before a binding European deadline, most national governments have yet to show the European Commission how they intend to bring degraded nature back to life. Under the Nature Restoration Regulation, the centrepiece of the bloc’s biodiversity strategy, every member state must submit a national restoration plan by 1 September 2026. The plans are meant to translate a continental ambition into hectares, budgets and timetables. So far, the gap between the rhetoric and the paperwork remains wide.
The regulation sets a steep curve. Member states must put restoration measures in place across at least a fifth of the Union’s land and sea by 2030, and ultimately across every ecosystem judged to need help by 2050. For habitats already in poor condition, governments must restore at least 30 percent by 2030, 60 percent by 2040 and 90 percent by mid-century. Drained peatlands must be rewetted, rivers reconnected to their floodplains, and pollinator populations stabilised after years of decline. Each of those targets implies money, land-use decisions and, in many capitals, a political fight.
That fight has not gone away since the law squeaked through its final vote. Farmers’ organisations continue to warn that restoration will compete with food production, particularly where rewetting touches drained agricultural soils. Several governments inserted flexibility clauses during negotiations, and the Commission has stressed that plans can phase obligations over time. Critics counter that flexibility risks becoming an excuse for inaction, and that a plan submitted late and thinly costed will not reverse the long slide in Europe’s wildlife.
The financing question is unavoidable. The Union has committed to channelling a rising share of its budget toward biodiversity objectives, reaching ten percent of annual spending in both 2026 and 2027. Whether that proves adequate depends heavily on the next long-term budget, where nature funding competes with defence, competitiveness and migration. Restoration also leans on national co-financing, and treasuries under pressure are rarely generous toward outcomes that mature over decades rather than electoral cycles.
What happens after 1 September will signal how seriously the law is taken. The Commission will assess each plan and can ask for revisions, but it has no power to write the plans itself. The risk is a familiar one in environmental policy, where a binding target on paper quietly softens into an aspiration in practice. For now, the clock is running, the habitats keep degrading on schedule, and the documents that are supposed to halt that decline are mostly still being written.
