Brussels: The EU’s nature restoration drive faces its first hard test this summer, with every member state due to file a draft plan by 1 September 2026 setting out how it will heal damaged ecosystems.

The Nature Restoration Regulation, in force since August 2024, obliges governments to restore at least 30 percent of habitats in poor condition by 2030, 60 percent by 2040 and 90 percent by 2050. It is the first EU law that requires countries not merely to protect nature but actively to bring it back.

Each capital must translate those targets into a National Restoration Plan, mapping priorities, measures, funding and governance out to 2050. Draft plans are due in September 2026, with final versions following a year later. The Commission set out the timetable in its guidance on the regulation.

The ambitions reach well beyond protected reserves. The law pushes members to return at least 25,000 kilometres of rivers to a free-flowing state and to plant three billion additional trees by 2030, reversing decades of drainage, damming and habitat loss.

With weeks left before the draft deadline, progress looks uneven. Independent reviewers say a handful of frontrunners are drawing up credible plans, while many governments remain at an early or insufficient stage.

The most common weakness, campaigners warn, is not scientific but political. Environmental groups such as the European Environmental Bureau found that many governments have yet to give their agencies the staff, money or authority to deliver.

The law’s path has been rocky from the start. It survived a bruising political fight in 2023 and 2024, when farming lobbies and centre-right lawmakers argued it would squeeze food production and burden landowners. Supporters countered that healthy soils, pollinators and wetlands underpin the very farming the critics sought to defend.

That tension still shapes how capitals write their plans. Governments must square restoration targets with agriculture, forestry and energy projects, and several are moving cautiously to avoid antagonising rural voters.

Brussels frames the effort as insurance rather than sacrifice. Restored wetlands soak up floods, forests cool cities and store carbon, and recovering fish stocks sustain coastal economies, benefits the Commission argues far outweigh the cost of action.

The September filings will offer the first real measure of whether that argument has landed. Strong plans would show the bloc can turn a landmark law into fieldwork; thin ones would hand critics fresh grounds to say the targets were never realistic. Either way, nature restoration is about to move from statute book to national commitment.