Nijmegen: Along the Waal, engineers spent years moving dikes back from the river to give floodwater somewhere to go. The result now doubles as habitat, and it is exactly the kind of project that member states have started counting in a new set of documents sitting in the Commission’s inbox.
Every capital had to submit a draft national restoration plan by 1 September under the Nature Restoration Regulation, the law that survived one of the bitterest legislative fights of the previous mandate. The plans set out how each country intends to hit the regulation’s targets, starting with measures covering a fifth of land and sea areas by 2030 and running through to full coverage of ecosystems needing restoration by 2050. They cover farmland, forests, rivers, marine habitats and urban green space, and they must show which sites, which measures and which money.
Submission is not approval. The Commission now reviews each draft and may issue observations, which member states have to take into account before they finalise the plans. That review will test whether the targets translate into anything a landowner or a water authority can act on. Environmental organisations that tracked the drafting phase warned repeatedly that some capitals were assembling inventories of existing designations rather than programmes of new work, and the difference between the two decides whether the regulation changes anything on the ground.
Two structural problems will shape the assessment. The first is money. The regulation does not come with a dedicated fund, so national plans lean on the common agricultural policy, cohesion programmes, LIFE and national budgets. Those instruments are all in flux as negotiations on the next multiannual budget grind forward, and a plan that assumes a funding stream still under negotiation carries obvious risk. The second is data. Restoring an ecosystem requires knowing its current condition, and monitoring coverage varies enormously between member states and between habitat types. Marine habitats are the weakest link almost everywhere.
Farm organisations remain the loudest sceptics. Their objection has narrowed since the original fight, from opposition in principle to concern about rewetting drained peatland, which the regulation pushes hard because drained peat emits carbon at rates that overwhelm most other land-use accounting. Rewetting changes what a field can grow and what it is worth. Several plans propose voluntary schemes with payments attached, and whether farmers take them up will decide the peatland numbers more than any legal target.
There is also a governance question that the implementation guidance does not fully settle. Restoration usually happens on land the state does not own, through decisions taken by regions, municipalities and private holders. A national plan can commit a ministry. It cannot commit a Flemish province or a Spanish autonomous community without their agreement, and several drafts were assembled under time pressure with limited regional buy-in.
The regulation gives the Commission until the middle of the decade to build a picture of whether the Union is on course. The drafts filed this month are the first evidence. Reading them properly will take months, and the reading matters more than the filing.
