Irish political parties accused of misrepresenting EU nature restoration law

An attempt to kill a proposed nature restoration law in the European Parliament led by Fine Gael’s European People’s Party has come under severe pressure after a series of major companies and industry groups made an appeal in favour of the law.

In a joint announcement on Monday, more than 60 businesses including Nestlé, Ikea and Unilever argued that the world’s food security and future economic stability rely on the restoration of wrecked ecosystems.

“Nature restoration and food security are interdependent – we rely on nature for producing our raw materials,” Nestlé executive Bart Vandewaetere said in a statement.

He said the area suitable for Nestlé to grow coffee may fall by half by 2050 “if we don’t intervene”.

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Adopting the proposed Nature Restoration Law would “generate benefits for farmers and their livelihoods and environment, improving soil health, restoring water cycles and increasing biodiversity,” Mr Vandewaetere said.

The flagship law, which is the central pillar of EU plans to reverse a collapse in insect life and wildlife populations, faces a “rejection amendment” in a vote in the European Parliament on Thursday that would kill the legislation.

Sinn Féin MEP Chris MacManus backed binning the law in a previous vote, as did Fine Gael’s Colm Markey, as well as lawmakers representing Fianna Fáil’s Renew political group.

Earlier this month, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told The Irish Times the law would reduce farmland, potentially causing food insecurity, and that it might make it harder to build wind farms.

There has been fierce pushback against these claims, however, with industry groups, rival political parties, and sources within the European Commission rejecting the assertions as a misrepresentation of the law.

In an unusually strong statement, wind energy industry body WindEurope rejected as “fundamentally wrong” the claim by Fine Gael’s EPP group that nature restoration would be an obstacle to the development of wind farms.

“Nature restoration and the expansion of wind energy go hand in hand,” the group said in a statement, adding that it “empathically supports” the legislation’s goal of restoring 30 per cent of ecologically degraded areas.

“The Commission’s proposal must not be watered down or delayed,” WindEurope said.

In an explanatory paper distributed to the Irish Government and others in advance of the vote, the European Commission pushed back against the idea that the law would take farmland out of service.

It stressed that nature restoration would only take place in existing protected areas, and that the law “does not impose the creation of new protected areas”, according to a copy seen by The Irish Times.

While farming on former peatlands generates a disproportionate amount of carbon emissions, countries that have a large amount of farming on former peatland would have the option to “re-wet” non-farming peatland instead, such as former peat harvesting sites, it states. “Further flexibility” is also possible.

The Commission paper argues that nature restoration has “strong economic benefits”, with an estimated eight-fold return on every euro invested, and that it can go “hand-in-hand with economic activity”.

It states that rewetting farmland should be made “economically attractive” for farmers through financial support, and that there would be a dedicated fund for nature restoration.

[ Q&A: What is rewetting and why is it important? ]

“It is essential for enhancing the productivity and resilience of forest and agricultural land, which is already severely threatened by the growing impacts of climate change in almost all parts of Europe, with droughts, fires and degraded soils that risk food production and livelihoods, especially in rural areas,” the Commission paper reads.

In a statement on Monday, however, the Irish Farmers’ Association called for the proposed law to be “paused”.

President Tim Cullinan said that Irish farmers had made huge efforts to protect nature, but were against the proposed nature restoration law which he described as “poorly thought-out and rushed”.